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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
JULY 2015 * VOL. 228 » NO.1
Camouflage- clad bush-meat
hunters pose in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of a 1976 Ebola outbreak.
Stalking a Killer
Ona Roll Feeding Frenzy In Gandhi’s Footsteps Pluto at Last
| Proof | Mountain Men On the Cover
Corrections and Clarifications
OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
THROUGH THE LENS
Capturing Natural Light
Nevada Wier, award-winning National Geographic contributing photographer and world traveler, shares her insights on creating the best image.
Fm “Light is the single most important element in photography. The trick is to use it in a startling
way. | like photographing at the edge of light, when sunrise and sunset can produce such extreme colors. Both of these images were made in equatorial parts of the world where those transition times and hues are fast and fleeting.
| photographed the U Bein Bridge, in Myanmar, just after sunset. The moving bicycles, tree limbs, bold yellow, and silhouette show how light, color, action, and pattern can combine in one instant to make an image unique. The fishing nets in Cochin, India, were also photographed at sunset. In this case, that little blue sail against the orange sky became the special punctuation that | needed to set the image apart.
You can't plan pictures like these, but you can train your eye to be ready for them. The right design, framing, and moment all matter—but light binds it all together.”
Light also plays a critical role in vision and how you see the world. That's why Nevada insists on Transitions® Signature” lenses when choosing a pair of glasses to wear throughout the day. Transitions’ adaptive lenses” filter just the right amount of light. So you see everything the way it's meant to be seen. Maybe even a little better.
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FROM THE EDITOR Nat Geo to Go
Taking Back Detroit
Portraits of the Motor City
ZINE
PRawaitan
PROOF
Grow Ecuade
ng Up in Mystical Mangroves
Nat Geo View natlonalgeographic.com
co F t
These Creepy Meat-Eating Plants Will Haunt Your Dreams hi
National aphic on Snapchat
The Future of Storytelling
Recently National Geographic was honored ina way that encapsulates what it means to reinvent a brand founded in 1888 during the most disruptive, energizing, difficult, exciting, and transformative time ever in media.
At the 2015 National Magazine Awards, the pre- mier honors in magazine journalism, we won the top prizes for photography and our tablet edition.
I share this not to brag about our tremendously talented staff, but because these accolades reflect how our iconic yellow border is framing platforms both new and traditional in this, our 128th year.
National Geographic and visual storytelling have been inseparable; our pictures touch hearts, raise awareness of urgent issues, and take people on journeys to places they will never go. The power of images to inspire, reveal, transport, and engage transcends language. This is something generations of readers have instinctively understood. From this perspective, the photography award—though difficult to attain against gifted competitors—isn’t too surprising.
The prize for the best tablet edition, however, is another matter. It illustrates the direction of
our future storytelling.
These days readers can have a National Geograph- ic experience wherever and whenever they want one. That’s why, in addition to the print magazine, we have focused on digital products: our tablet; our recently retooled website, nationalgeographic.com; our Nat Geo View app; and a new partnership to allow mobile Facebook readers to share everything from a photo, map, or video within a story to the entire story itself. We’re all over social media, where, in addition to Facebook, we're leaders on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, to name a few.
It’s all part of our passion to explore, innovate, and live up to our motto: “We believe in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world.”
That's our commitment today and for years to come. Join us—on whatever platform you choose to take on the journey.
Df Ab atl,
Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief
PHOTOS: iSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS (PHONES)
©2015 Canon Inc. canon.com
American Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) Size: Body length, including tail, 2.3 - 6.1 m (7.5 - 20 ft) Weight: Up to 1,000 kg (2,200 |b) Habitat: Brackish estuaries, rivers, coastal lagoons and mangrove swamps Surviving
number: Unknown
Photographed by Kurt W. Baumgartner
WILDLIFE AS CANON SEES IT
Hungry for anything. The American crocodile will eat whatever it can overpower, from fish and crabs to snakes, turtles and small mammals. At home in the water, the crocodile moves surprisingly fast when galloping on land. It is also quite noisy considering its lack of vocal cords; pushing air from lungs to nostrils, it can hiss, cough, growl, grunt and bellow. These
sounds come into play for courtship, contact calls and when threatening. But this formidable predator is also threatened, facing habitat loss, hunting and deadly run-ins with vehicles.
As Canon sees it, images have the power to raise awareness of the threats facing endangered species and the natural environment, helping us make the world a better place.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
We believe in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world.
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We waste enough food to feed all of the 1 BILLION malnourished people on the planet three times over!
STEP UP TO THE PLATE and help do something about it!
National Geographic Kids Almanac 2016
bursting with cool facts, amazing animals, awesome photos, and tons of information about kids’ favorite stuff.
AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KiDS
3 Questions
Nominate someone for 3 Questions at nationalgeographic.com/3Q.
Why Fixing the Climate Is Like Fixing the Economy
Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
You’ve likened the climate crisis to a financial
crisis. How do the two compare?
Excesses of debt created the financial crisis; excess of CO, created the climate crisis. These are coupled with flawed government policies and incentives and pervasive, outsize risktaking. The difference is that last-minute government action averted economic Armageddon during the financial crisis. We don’t have that option
with climate change.
What’s the economic risk in doing nothing?
If we don’t act, the risks will compound, and we'll lose the opportunity to avoid the worst outcomes. Businesses need to factor the threats from climate change into their investment decisions and to urge local and national policy actions. When climate-related disasters strike,
we all pay. We urgently need policies such as carbon pricing to incentivize behavior change and promote clean technologies.
What’s your best hope for addressing
the problems of climate change?
We can still avoid the worst effects if we act now. In the U.S. we need a national policy to help reduce our use of carbon-based fuels. But ultimately the crux of the challenge lies in the developing world, especially China. To resolve the climate crisis, the U.S. and China— the world’s largest economies, energy users, and carbon emitters—must work together to deploy cost-effective new technologies in the developing world. If our coun- tries lead, others will follow.
PHOTO: HENRY LEUTWYLER, CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES.
Fleas x Ticks? I got 3 words for ya:
12 weeks g a
I got 1 word for you: wow! 2
Bravecto.com
Jack says only BRAVECTO® provides up to 12 weeks’ of flea & tick protection in a tasty chew. Talk to the expert on all things dog—your vet.
BRA ECTO
(FLURALANER)
“Bravecto kills fleas, prevents flea infestations, and kills ticks (black-legged tick, American dog tick, and brown dog tick) for 12 weeks. Bravecto also kills lone star ticks for 8 weeks.
Bravecto is for dogs 6 months of age or older, and is approved for pregnant, breeding and lactating dogs. Side effects may include vomiting, decreased appetite, diarrhea, lethargy, excessive thirst, and flatulence.
Please see Brief Summary of Prescribing Information on following page. MERCK
Copyright © 2015 Intervet Inc., d/b/a Merck Animal Health, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. US/BRV/0115/0006 Animal Health
NADA 141-426, Approved by FDA
BRAVECTO
(FLURALANER)
BRIEF SUMMARY (For full Prescribing Information, see package insert)
Caution: Federal (USA) law restricts this drug to use by or on the order of a licensed veterinarian.
Indications:
Bravecto kills adult fleas and is indicated for the treatment and prevention of flea infestations (Ctenocephalides felis) and the treatment and control of tick infestations {Ixodes scapularis (black-leqged tick), Dermacentor variabilis (American dog tick), and Rhipicephalus sanguineus (brown dog tick)] for 12 weeks in dogs and puppies 6 months of age and older, and weighing 4.4 pounds or greater.
Bravecto is also indicated for the treatment and contro! of Amblyomma americanum (lone star tick) infestations for 8 weeks in dogs and puppies 6 months of age and older, and weighing 4.4 pounds or greater.
Contraindications: There are no known contraindications for the use of the product.
Warnings: Not for human use. Keep this and all drugs out of the reach of children. Keep the product in the original packaging until use, in order to prevent children from getting direct access to the product. Do not eat, drink or smoke while handling the product. Wash hands thoroughly with soap and water immediately after use of the product.
Precautions: Bravecto has not been shown to be effective for 12-weeks duration in puppies less than 6 months of age. Bravecto is not effective against Amblyomma americanum ticks beyond 8 weeks after dosing.
Adverse Reactions:
Ina well-controlled US. field study, which included 294 dogs (224 dogs were administered Bravecto every 12 weeks and 70 dogs were administered an oral active control every 4 weeks and were provided with a tick collar); there were no serious adverse reactions. All potential adverse reactions were recorded in dogs treated with Bravecto over a 182-day period and in dogs treated with the active control over an 84-day period. The most frequently reported adverse reaction in dogs in the Bravecto and active control groups was vorniting.
Percentage of Dogs with Adverse Reactions in the Field Study
Bravecto Group: Percentage of Active Control! Group: Percentage Adverse Reaction (AR) Dogs with the AR During the of Dogs with the AR During the 182-Day Study (n=224 dogs) 84-Day Study (n=70 dogs)
Vomiting 7 143 Decreased Appetite 67 0.0 Diarrhea 43 29 Lethargy 54 71 Polydipsia 18 43 Flatulence 43 00
In a well-controlled laboratory dose confirmation study, one dog developed edema and hyperemia of the upper lips within one hour of receiving Bravecto. The edema improved progressively through the day and had resolved without medical intervention by the next morning.
For technical assistance or to report a suspected adverse drug reaction, contact Merck Animal Health at 1-800-224-5318. Additional information can be found at www.bravecto.com. For additional information about adverse drug experience reporting for animal drugs, contact FDA at 1-888-FDA-VETS or online at http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary/ SafetyHealth.
How Supplied: Bravecto is available in five strengths (112.5, 250, 500, 1000, and 1400 mg fluralaner per chew). Each chew is packaged individually into aluminum foil blister packs sealed with a peelable paper backed foil lid stock. Product may be packaged in 1, 2, or 4 chews per package
Distributed by: Intervet Inc (d/b/a Merck Animal Health) Summit, NJ 07901
Made in Austria
Copyright © 2014 Intervet Inc, a subsidiary of Merck & Company Inc. All rights reserved
141487 R2 & MERCK
Animal Health
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EXPLOR
SS Wild Things
Nesting Instincts
Some twig pieces here, a bit of dry grass there. How sophisticated could a bird nest be? Quite, according to ornithologist Mark Mainwaring. With ateam of researchers from the U.K. and France, Mainwaring deciphered four evolutionary drives that have shaped how a given species builds its nest. The structures, he says, are designed to serve one or more of four functions: provide warmth or shade for hatchlings, attract mates, prevent para- site infestations, and protect against predators.
For example, says Mainwaring, to keep adults and babies warm during cold spring nights, a Tennessee warbler used ample foliage to build the nest at right (1). And with an eye toward luring po- tential mates, a Bullock’s oriole adorned its nest (7) with flashy blue ribbons. In other nest designs pine needles act as excellent camouflage in a forest, as do shells on the beach; feathers play a role in repelling fleas and lice.
The team plans to study how climate change affects nestbuilding. Meanwhile the findings may inspire new appreciation for birds and their not-so- humble homes. —Catherine Zuckerman
1. Tennessee warbler, Califor- 2. House wren, California 3. Tree swallow, Cornell Univer- nia Academy of Sciences; Academy of Sciences; sity Museum of Vertebrates; collected near New Bruns- collected in Oakville, collected on Tatoosh Island, wick, Canada, in 1918 California, in 1974 Washington, in 1995
5. Brown creeper, Museum 6. Caspian tern, Western 7. Bullock's oriole, Cornell of Vertebrate Zoology; Foundation of Vertebrate University Museum of collected in Pierce County, Zoology; collected in Baja Vertebrates; collected in Washington, 1926 California, Mexico, in 1932 Ithaca, New York, in 2003
4, Small ground finch, Califor- nia Academy of Sciences; collected on San Cristobal Island, Galapagos, in 1906
8. Western tanager, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology; collected near Carson City, Nevada, in 1934
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
PHOTOS: SHARON BEALS. SOURCES: MARK C. MAINWARING, IAN R. HARTLEY, MARCEL M. LAMBRECHTS, D. CHARLES DEEMING
EXPLORE Science
Easy on the Eyes
A few coats of mascara can make even the puniest lashes look luscious. But some cosmetics companies use rabbits as their guinea pigs, an FDA-sanctioned practice that many people oppose. The tests—which involve applying products to the animals’ eyes to deter- mine toxicity—can cause blindness and death. Perhaps not for much longer. New research from the University of Liverpool sug- x” gests that protozoa may be a key to developing cruelty-free makeup. According to ecol- ae ogist David Montagnes, the ; cheap and abundant single- celled organisms may have enough genes in common with humans to make them good trial subjects. “This is the future of animal testing,” says Montagnes. ee “Protozoa do not possess a central nervous system and therefore don’t feel pain.” 7 * Using them could spell relief re | y for lab rabbits and their advo- re ssaaiila
x ~ N cates. —Catherine Zuckerman at TT Me, LE . Ls
+ WHAT SHOULD THE NAMES BE? YOU DECIDE. + If you've ever wanted to name a planet, now’s your chance. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) wants help naming
exoplanets—planets that orbit a star other than our sun. Scientific and cultural or
anizations were asked to submit potential names. The public can rank finalists at nameexoworlds.org until July 15. The nearest of all the planets is ten light-years from Earth; the farthest is more than 2,300 light-years away. “We don’t think any
are habitable,” says IAU General Secretary Thierry Montmerle
“But some could be close.” —Daniel Stone
PHOTO: REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF. ART: MATTHEW TWOMBLY, NGM STAFF
=} _how long do rabbits live
9 y (Optimal conditions)
Rabbit, Lifespan
v Breeds and overview
PCy
EXPLORE inefe)e)
The Future of Food nztgeofood.com
Hungry for information? Make a selection from our menu of food facts— and taste more at natgeofood.com.
| “doctrine of sig eld that plants resembling body parts could benefit those parts.
\
UPSIDE DOWN Fresh eggs should be stored pointed end down to better
preserve their freshness
JOY OF FRUIT
The word “ comes from the Latin fructus, which means “enjoyment.”
(U00
A WIDE VARIETY There are more than 7,000 different varieties of apples.
BEAUTIFUL OBJECT Tomatoes were once thought to be poisonous and were grown for their ornamental value.
WORLD’S FARE
Ice-cream cones were first popu-
larized at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri
10\b
BANANA FANS Annual pe! pita consumption of bananas by Americans
ART: ALVARO VALINO. SOURCES: HOW CARROTS WON THE TROJAN WAR; LAROUSSE GASTRONOMIQUE; OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD; USDA; WHAT EINSTEIN TOLD HIS COOK 2
how much iron is in a walnut
2.3 mg
Walnuts
1 cup, ground (80 g)
v More about Walnut
EXPLORE
Suyr Planet Earth
G The quagga mussel might be no bigger than a thumbnail, but it’s altering the Great r eedy Lakes’ food web and affecting the lakes’ four-to-seven-billion-dollar recreational
and commercial fishing industry. Native to Ukraine, the quagga now infests the Mi ussels lakes in even greater numbers than its invasive-species cousin the zebra mussel. Both are believed to have entered North America in the ballast of ships.
Like zebra mussels, quaggas feed by filtering lake water. Under the right condi- tions, the trillions of them in Lake Michigan can filter as much water as the lake contains every one to two days, removing algal species they prefer. Magnified 750 times, sediment samples from the lake show the base-of-the-food-web shifts. that have resulted from this mussel invasion. The water once teemed with the large, lipid-rich diatom algae called Stephanodiscus and Aulacoseira (above left) that nourished Lake Michigan’s extensive food web. Now that the mussels are hogging the choice algae, that food web is reorganizing to survive on fewer algae Quagga mussel (2X actual size) of the smaller varieties that are left, such as Cyclotella (above right). —Bill McGraw
THE FRAGRANT FOREST FACTOR
The magical scents of a pine grove are—less poetically—volatile organic compounds (VOCs) rising from the trees. VOCs react in the air to form aerosol particles, often in amounts that can increase how much sunlight clouds reflect, which reduces temperatures. A new study shows that this process is stronger than once thought, highlighting the value of forests
Sunlight is reflected.
in a warming world. —Jane Vessels S € “Aerosols cause clouds to form. Trees release scented vapors, which turn into aerosols. ° i) fom ie} a ie) fe) ‘ ee 7 #.
. % P . é . C''« fe) fe} % ° .
Aah AMAA AAA Ad 4
PHOTOS: MARK B. EDLUND, SCIENCE MUSEUM OF MINNESOTA (TOP, BOTH); REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF ART: EMILY M, ENG, NGM STAFF SOURCE: NATURE.COM
how much water is in Lake Michigan
- NNESOTAUE "
IOWA 1CLINOIS PENNSYLV
1,180 cubic miles (4,918 km?)
v More about Lake Michigan
EXPLORE
Us
Dot Topic
Every ten years the U.S. census produces a mountain of data. Now demographers at the University of Virginia have brought those findings to life. They devised a map assigning a single dot to each person counted in the census. Plotting 300 million dots across the U.S. reveals major population cen- ters. Coloring dots based on race and ethnicity shows how cities (such as Washington, D.C.) often divide themselves. “We didn’t expect to still see such segregation in some parts of the country,” says Qian Cai, chief demographer at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center. Data
from past censuses add an MORE DIVERSE, extra dimension, showing BUT STILL DIVIDED
f h Fi ed One dot equals one how places have chang person in 2010, mapped over time. —Daniel Stone by census block.
SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHICS Population of Washington, D.C.
1980-2010 (in thousands) 400- CHANGE 1980-2010 300- Black 432% White f 26% 200-
100-
® White Hispanic f 208%
° an _——_ Asian t 228% —_—_—_—"=
® Hispanic e -,,, Other t 510%
® Other ‘80 "90 "00 "10
RYAN MORRIS, NGM STAFF; DUSTIN A. CABLE, WELDON COOPER CENTER FOR PUBLIC SERVICE, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. SOURCE: NATIONAL HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM
== what's the population “~~ of Washington, D.C
658,893 (2014
slatic
Baltimore 622,104 (2013)
rces include: United State
v Show more
Boston 645,966 (2013)
EXPLORE
4 @® ila things
moves
Fa ne Look out, Looney Tunes: Fourteen new species of dancing frogs have been y discovered in India. Found only in tropical forests of the Western Ghats, some (Cj Webb e d) of these thumb-size amphibians have a peculiar courtship ritual. Males, which vastly outnumber females, perch on rocks and wave their feet vigorously to catch Fo otw O rk the eye of potential mates. The fancy footwork evolved because singing, another mode of frog communication, is mostly drowned out in the din of their streamside
homes, says the University of Delhi’s S. D. Biju. The performances also serve
to intimidate other males and, if a rival comes too close, to kick him off the rock. The new discovery brings the known species of dancing frogs to 24, many
of which are extremely rare. Biju is concerned that human development will
encroach on the frogs’ habitat. That could mean a sad curtain call for these
high-stepping amphibians. —Christine Dell'Amore
FISHY BEHAVIOR Rising carbon dioxide levels mean acidifying oceans and strange-acting fish. When exposed to 991 parts per million
of CQ, in the atmosphere—scientists’ worst-case prediction for Earth in 2100—laboratory fish became less curious and forgot which side they prefer to turn (similar to handedness in people). One speci am without taking breaks. The CO, may alter brain chemistry or cause chronic stre: Fredrik Jutfelt of Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.
PHOTO: S. D. BIJU. ART: MIKEL JASO.
== where are the 8 =~" Western Ghats Y
Western Ghats, Kannan Devan Hills, Kerala 685561, India
EXPLORE Ancient Worlds
r a Coldest
de Casualties
The warming world is reveal- ing the buried past. In the far north of Italy, at altitudes above 6,500 feet, the frozen corpses of World War | sol- diers are melting free of their icy tombs.
They're casualties of the White War, waged by Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops from 1915 to 1918. “Many were very young,” says lead archaeologist Franco Nicolis, who notes that diaries and unsent letters have been found since the early 1990s. “I think of the mothers who never saw their boys again.”
Before being properly buried, each thawed body is analyzed by forensic anthro- pologist Daniel Gaudio. But without ID tags, he says, DNA traces alone haven't led toa family match.
Retreating glaciers promise more opportunities. In sum-
NY Two Austro-Hungarian ss , < mer Nicolis will guide visitors §» WwWlisoldiers lie fused } ¢ © toasite 12,000 feet up.
_ toggther on the Presena ‘ “Inside this base, this wooden |» Glacier in the Italian Alps. . cabin, you can still smell the war.” —Jeremy Berlin
EXTINCTIONS IN EGYPT THROUGH THE AGES
Animals both fantastical and real cover a ceremonial stone cosmetics palette sculpted in Egypt in about 3200 B.c. The actual creatures. including wild dogs.
raffes, hartebeests, wildebeests, ibex, oryx, and
ostriches, must have roamed Egypt at that time but are not found
there todz
recent study used such artifacts as well as texts and
ils to track the disappearance of animals over the course of 6,000
s. “What’s unique about Egypt is the high-resolution reporting,”
says Justin Ye ton ther ch team. Animals that
, an ecologi
dropped out of the finely detailed human observations helped reveal how wildlife populations changed over time. —A. R. Williams
PHOTOS: ARCHAEOLOGICAL HERITAGE OFFICE, TRENTO (ABOVE); ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Basic Instincts A genteel disquisition on love and lust in the animal kingdom
Too Hot to Handle
River terrapins try hard to be fruitful and multiply. Males use their bold breeding colors to entice mates, and their toenails to keep sex partners in their grasp. Females grow larger than males, the better to carry many big eggs. In mating season they couple liberally. Then females travel long distances, sometimes braving salt water, to sandbanks where they lay and bury several clutches of eggs a year. Despite such valiant efforts, five of the six species in the terrapin genus Batagur are critically endan- gered, says Rick Hudson, president of the Turtle Survival Alliance. Terrapins lose habitat to sand mining and die as bycatch in fishing nets. Eggs are snatched from nests, to eat or sell; adults are shipped to China, where they’re a banquet delicacy. Even temperature can influence survival: The sex of birds and mammals is determined by chromo- somes, but the sex of many turtles is influenced by temperature during incubation. Often hatchlings from cooler settings will be male; from warmer ones, female. When captive-breeding programs have kept eggs too cool, Hudson says, they’ve yielded few or no females, which typically lay hundreds of eggs in a lifetime. Conversely, the advance of climate change could mean warmer incubation locations, a preponderance of females—and a shortage of baby daddies. —Patricia Edmonds
HABITAT/RANGE Estuaries in Southeast Asia
CONSERVATION STATUS, Critically endangered
OTHER FACTS
Females lay eggs in nests about 12 inches deep. At dif- ferent depths, eggs incubate at different temperatures.
In mating season terrapins couple liberally. Then females travel long distances
to lay eggs.
This painted terrapin (Batagur borneoensis) in breeding colors was photographed
at the zoo in Omaha, Nebraska.
PHOTO: JOEL SARTORE
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¢ _ Indonesia Off the east coast of ig ig Sulawesi, on the bottom of the Lembeh Strait, pe od the wide-eyed face of ye EW ololoiolire mit: lel-4-1g oa emerges through black i % Ao) (er-lal(oae=s-lale Mal a3. . &» _ fish, named for the Ls eyes atop their heads, ‘, ambush their prey.
PHOTO: JENNIFER JO STOCK
#) England The gnarled land-
% scape of Wistman’s
“ Wood—moss-draped boulders, ferns, grass, lichen-covered dwarf oaks —is shrouded in fog and myth. Fairies, druids, and hellhounds are said to haunt this part of Dartmoor National Park.
PHOTO: DUNCAN GEORGE, we GETTY IMAGES Bey
Iceland
Beneath the Breidamer-
kurjékull glacier—part
of Vatnajokull, one of
the largestice caps . in Europe—a man in
a boat is dwarfed by
the walls of an ice r cave, Summer melting a, expands the tunnel, and ‘ a the river swells to fill it.
PHOTO: VILHELM GUNNARSSON
® Order prints of select National Geographic photos onlineat NationalGeographicArt.com.
FAMILY ORDER
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SPECIAL REPORT
Animal Trade: By the Numbers
Global trade in wild-sourced live animals by species, 2012
REPTILES 145 species
335,562 animals traded
Reptiles are the most commonly traded class of animals and are ordinarily used
for leather products.
92 species
105,449 animals traded
Birds are mostly sold as pets: Some 62% of Appendix II* birds traded were hatched in captivity, and 38% were captured from the wild.
Other | Invertebrates:
hear
—————
Corals: 1,212,155
SS
Coral \ Anthozoa Wild-harvested species make up 98% of traded Appendix II coral. More than half is routed to the U.S. for aquarium use.
j
/
/
J
Map turtle
Graptemys
Map turtles were once widely sold as pets. U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations have led to a decrease in breeding and sales. v
Turtles 238,913
Monk parakeet Myiopsitta monachus
Native to South America, the birds are popu- lar pets but are also considered agricultural
pests. They're banned in several U.S. states. African
a Parrots
Birds of prey 342
Species for Sale
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is a legally binding agreement among
181 countries covering international trade in plants and animals. It’s a lot to cover: More than 35,000 species fall under its protection. Wildlife trade can play an important role in local economies—and also in conservation. Ac- cording to CITES Secretary John E. Scanlon, “We regulate international trade in wildlife to ensure it is legal, sustain- able, and traceable and that it is not detrimental to the survival of species in the wild.
—Margaret G. Zackowitz
“Appendix II species are not necessarily threatened but may become so unless trade is controlled.
Asiatic softshell turtle
Amyda cartilaginea
Softshell turtles—used as food and in folk remedies—are farmed by the millions, but wild populations are still down.
Sd
White sturgeon Acipenser transmontanus
ae
15 species
104,520 animals traded
and paddlefi
‘Sturgeons
Caviar is the most valuable fishery commodity managed by CITES. Wild- sourced exports have declined since 1999.
Costly Reptiles
Reptiles and reptile skins
are among the most valuable products tracked by CITES— but it all depends on the finishing. A hunter may sell a captured python for just $30; EVaR-)(-er-lul@ar- lire eae Rere-li (re from python skin can cost as
much as $10,000. $232
Reptiles
The species of sturgeon most commonly harvested for caviar are endangered or threatened.
Royal python Python regius Almost all the trade in Southeast Asian python skins is funneled to
Dragon the European fashion industry. lizards v Lizards 74,740 Snakes 19,292 Alligators 2,617
13 species
11,646 animals traded
72 species
2,462 animals traded
1
Seahorses 2,907
Mammals accounted for 15% of the total value of Appendix I animal trade (2006-2010).
Estimated value of trade in CITES Appendix II species by taxonomic group, 2010 (in millions of 2010 U.S. dollars)
Invertebrates
Mammals
$0.2 Amphibians
JASON TREAT AND EMILY M. ENG, NGM STAFF; MEG ROOSEVELT
SOURCE: CITES SECRETARIAT (2012), “CITES TRADE: RECENT TRENDS IN APPENDIX l-LISTED SPECIES (1996-2010),” PREPARED BY UNEP-WCMC
Legal Notice
If You Worked Around Gaskets or Packing Containing Asbestos
The Garlock Bankruptcy May Affect Your Rights.
Certain Personal Injury Claims Must be Filed by October 6, 2015
There is a bankruptcy involving claims about exposure to asbestos-containing gasket and packing products. Garlock Sealing Technologies LLC, The Anchor Packing Company, and Garrison Litigation Management Group, Ltd. (“Debtors”) have filed a plan of reorganization to restructure their business and pay claims.
The products (with names like Garlock, Blue- Gard, Gylon, and Flexseal) were used in places where steam, hot liquid or acids moved through pipes, including industrial and maritime settings.
Who is Affected by the Garlock Bankruptcy? Your rights may be affected if you:
¢ Worked with or around Garlock asbestos- containing gaskets or packing, or any other asbestos-containing product for which Debtors are responsible, or Have a claim now or in the future against the Debtors for asbestos-related disease caused by any person’s exposure to asbestos-containing products.
Even if you have not yet been diagnosed with any disease or experienced any symptoms, your rights may be affected. The Court has appointed a Future Claimants’ Representative (“FCR”) to represent the rights of these future claimants. Future claimants do not need to file a claim at this time.
What Does the Plan Provide? The Plan is the result of a settlement agreement between the FCR, the Debtors, and the Debtors’ parent company. The Plan proposes to use $357.5 million to pay, in full, all pending and future asbestos claims against Garlock and Garrison. If necessary, up to $132 million in additional funding will be provided. If the Plan is approved, you will no longer be able to file claims directly against the Debtors or affiliated companies. If you have claims only against Anchor, you are not expected
to recover anything, as that company has no assets and will be dissolved.
Who Must File a Personal Injury Claim? You must file a claim by October 6, 2015, if you:
* Have a claim against Garlock or Garrison based on an asbestos-related injury diagnosed on or before August 1, 2014,
* Have not settled with the Debtors, and
* Filed a lawsuit against any other defendant or aclaim against any asbestos trust as of August 1, 2014.
If you do not file a claim, you may lose your right to bring your claim in the future. Individuals diagnosed with disease after August 1, 2014 do not have to file a claim at this time, but may be able to vote or object to the Plan.
Who Can Vote on or Object to the Plan?
All identifiable asbestos claimants or their attorneys will receive the “Solicitation Package”. This includes the Plan, Voting Ballot, and other information. If you have not filed a claim yet, you can vote on the Plan by providing certified information about your claim, or making a motion to vote as described in the Solicitation Package available online or by calling the toll- free number.
You will need to vote on the Plan by October 6, 2015. The FCR will support and vote to accept the Plan on behalf of the future claimants. You may also object to the Plan and the adequacy of the FCR’s representation of future claimants by October 6, 2015.
When will the Court Decide on the Plan? A hearing to consider confirmation of the Plan will begin at 10:00 a.m. ET on June 20, 2016, at the US Bankruptcy Court, Western District of North Carolina, 401 West Trade Street, Charlotte, NC 28202.
For Information:
www.GarlockNotice.com 1-844-Garlock
VISIONS. YourShot.ngm.com
Behind the Adventure
Assignment We asked to see photos that show what inspired you during a challenging new experience.
EDITOR’S NOTE
arely do we see the unguarded moments of an adventure. These images showed the per- sonal, transformative, beautiful, humorous, and even painful moments of exploring.”
Fabrice Guérin Paris, France
In a cenote near Tulum, Mexico, Guérin went div- ing with his wife. As they dived deeper, the water color changed from blue to green and the water itself from fresh to salt water. The atmosphere, Guérin says, felt like a lunar landscape.
Gabe R. DeWitt Morgantown, West Virginia
DeWitt and four friends were hiking near May Lake in Yosemite National Park. While they were camped, he noticed that his photos around the fire were coming out overexposed. Only when the flames died down did he get a softer glow.
be. Mia
DANGEROUS GAME
A hunter from a small village
in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC) adjusts
3 the mask that he’ll wear
9B while stalking game. The
. consumption of infected bush meat is one way Ebola virus passes to humans.
Ritieat
to hiding
E 2.
t goes in
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it
j> ae - y 3Ht 7 > = ty” yy ? » 2 >, bd WA 4 oF = > y* ce dl > 2 ¥ <4 % FAR > ‘ : : | D4 .4 > w %. woo 1 PO 7 ay .< oa > A?
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UNDER SUSPICION,
Straw-colored fruit bats swarm in an Ivory Coast village. Fruit bats, some of which have been suspected of Carrying Ebola, are abundant in many parts of Africa and are often eaten.
STRICKEN
Delirious from Ebola, f aman is lifted after he
tried to climb the wall
of the Hastings Ebola f treatment center near ‘ Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. Twelve hours later he died, one more fatality in a count that now exceeds 10,000.
BY DAVID QUAMMEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETE MULLER
oone foresaw, back in December
of 2013, that the little boy who
fell ill in a village called Mélian-
dou, in Guinea, West Africa,
would be the starting point of a gruesome epidemic, one that would devastate three countries and provoke concern, fear, and argument around the planet.
No one imagined that this child’s death, af- ter just a few days’ suffering, would be only the first of many thousands. His name was Emile Ouamouno. His symptoms were stark—intense fever, black stool, vomiting—but those could have been signs of other diseases, including malaria. Sad to say, children die of unidenti- fied fevers and diarrheal ailments all too fre- quently in African villages. But soon the boy’s sister was dead too, and then his mother, his grandmother, a village midwife, and a nurse. The contagion spread through Méliandou to other villages of southern Guinea. This was
36 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « JULY 2015
almost three months before the word “Ebola” began to flicker luridly in email traffic between Guinea and the wider world.
The public health authorities based in Guin- ea’s capital, Conakry, and the viral disease track- ers from abroad weren’t in Méliandou when Emile Ouamouno died. Had they been, and had they understood that he was the first case in an outbreak of Ebola virus disease, they might have directed some timely attention to an important unknown: How did this boy get sick? What did he do, what did he touch, what did he eat? If Ebo- la virus was in his body, where did it come from?
Among the most puzzling aspects of Ebola virus, since its first recognized emergence al- most four decades ago, is that it disappears for years at a time. Since a 1976 outbreak in what then was Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and a simultaneous episode with a closely related virus in what was then south- ern Sudan (now South Sudan), the sequence of
Ebola events, large and small, has been sporad- ic. During one stretch of 17 years (1977-1994) nota single confirmed human death from infec- tion with Ebola virus occurred. This is not a sub- tle bug that simmers delicately among people, causing nothing more than mild headaches and sniffles. Ifit had been circulating in human pop- ulations for those 17 years, we would have known.
Avirus can’t survive for long, or replicate at all, except within a living creature. That means it needs a host—at least one kind of animal, or plant, or fungus, or microbe, whose body serves as its primary environment and whose cell ma- chinery it can co-opt for reproducing. Some harmful viruses abide in nonhuman animals and only occasionally spill into people. They cause diseases that scientists label zoonoses. Ebola is a zoonosis, an especially nasty and perplexing one—killing many of its human victims in a mat- ter of days, pushing others to the brink of death, and then vanishing. Where does it hide, quiet and inconspicuous, between outbreaks?
Not in chimpanzees or gorillas; field stud- ies have shown that Ebola often kills them too. Dramatic die-offs of chimps and gorillas have
Scientists wondered whether Angolan free- tailed bats might be Ebola reservoirs after they discovered that the first victim, a small boy named Emile Ouamouno, may have played in a tree (left) in Méliandou, Guinea, where the bats roosted. Above, Emile’s father holds snapshots of his family—all gone but him.
occurred around the same time and in the same area as Ebola virus disease outbreaks in hu- mans, and some carcasses have tested positi for signs of the virus. Scavenging ape car for food, in fact, has been one of the routes by which humans have infected themselves with Ebola. So the African apes are highly unlikely to harbor Ebola. It hits them and explodes. It must lurk somewhere else.
The creature in which a zoonotic virus ex- ists over the long term, usually without causing symptoms, is known as a reservoir host. Mon- keys serve as reservoir hosts for the yellow fe- ver virus. Asian fruit bats of the genus Pteropus are reservoirs of Nipah virus, which killed more than a hundred people during a 1998-99 out- break in Malaysia. Fruit bats also host Hendra
EBOLA 37
RISKY BELIEF
A healer prepares to exorcise a girl in Méliandou. Popular beliefs blame many ailments, including Ebola (which this girl did not have), on sorcery or malign spirits. Contact through some traditional practices can help spread the virus.
virus in Australia, where it drops from bats into horses, with devastating effect, and then into horse handlers and veterinarians, often killing them. The passage event, when a virus goes from its reservoir host to another kind of crea- ture, is termed spillover.
As for the reservoir host of Ebola—if you have heard that fruit bats again are the answer, you've heard supposition misrepresented as fact. De- spite arduous efforts by some intrepid scientists, Ebola virus has never been tracked to its source in the wild.
“Where is it when it’s not infecting humans?” Karl M. Johnson said to me recently. Johnson is an eminent virologist, a pioneer in Ebola research, the former head of the Viral Special Pathogens Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He led the inter- national response team against that initial 1976 outbreak in Zaire, a harrowing venture into the unknown. He also led a team that isolated the virus ina CDC lab, demonstrated that it was new to science, and named it after a modest Zairean waterway, the Ebola River. Johnson wondered back then about its hiding place in the wild. But the urgency of human needs during any Ebola outbreak makes investigations in viral ecology difficult and unpopular. If you're an African vil- lager, you don’t want to see foreigners in moon suits methodically dissecting small mammals when your loved ones are being hauled away in body bags. Thirty-nine years later, although we're beginning to learn a bit, Johnson said, the identity of the reservoir host “is still largely a monster question mark out there.”
A Rain of Bats
In April 2014, soon after word spread that the cluster of deaths in southern Guinea involved Ebola, Fabian Leendertz arrived there with a team of researchers. Leendertz is a German disease ecologist and veterinarian, based at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, who studies le- thal zoonoses in wildlife, with special attention to West Africa. He reached southern Guinea by driving overland from Ivory Coast, where he has worked for 15 years in Tai National Park
40 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
EBOLA IS NOTA SUBTLE BUG. IT KILLS MANY OF ITS HUMAN VICTIMS IN A MATTER OF DAYS, PUSHING OTHERS TO THE BRINK OF DEATH, BEFORE VANISHING.
on disease outbreaks among chimpanzees and other animals. He brought with him three big vehicles, full of equipment and people, and two questions. Had there been a recent die-off among chimps or other wildlife, possibly put- ting meat-hungry humans at risk from infected carcasses? Alternatively, had there been direct transmission from the Ebola reservoir host, whatever it was, into the first human victim? Leendertz knew nothing at that point about Emile Ouamouno. His team spoke with officials and local people and walked survey transects through two forest reserves, finding neither tes- timony nor physical evidence of any remarkable deaths among chimpanzees or other large mam- mals. Then they shifted their attention to the village of Méliandou, talked with people there, and heard avery interesting story about a hollow tree full of bats.
These were small bats, the quick-flying kind that echolocate and feed on insects, not the big creatures that fly out majestically at dusk, like a Halloween vision of nocturnal crows, to eat fruit. The locals called them lolibelo. They were dainty as mice and smelly, with wriggly tails that extended beyond their hind membranes. Showing pictures and taking descriptions, Leen- dertz’s team ascertained that the villagers were probably talking about the Angolan free-tailed
bat (Mops condylurus). These bats had roosted in great numbers within a big, hollow tree that stood beside a trail near the village. Then, just weeks before, the tree had been burned, pos- sibly during an attempt to gather honey. From the burning tree came what the people remem- bered as “a rain of bats.” The dead bats were gathered up, filling a half dozen hundred-pound rice sacks, and might have been eaten except for a sudden announcement from the government that because of Ebola, consuming bush meat was now prohibited. So the Méliandou villagers threw the dead bats away.
And there was something else about that hollow tree, the villagers told Leendertz’s team. Children, possibly including Emile Ouamouno, used to play in it, sometimes catching the bats. They would even roast them on sticks and eat them.
Leendertz consulted a colleague with exper- tise in recovering DNA from environmental samples, who told him it might be feasible to find enough beneath the tree to identify the bat species that had roosted there. “So I started run- ning around with my tubes and spoon collecting soil,” Leendertz told me. Back in Berlin, genetic sequencing confirmed the presence of Angolan free-tailed bats. So this creature—an insectivo- rous bat, not a fruit bat—joined the list of can- didates for the role of Ebola’s reservoir host.
The Hitchhiker The first clues in this long mystery—clues that seemed to point toward bats—arose from dis- ease outbreaks caused by Marburg virus, Ebola’s slightly less notorious relative within the group knownas filoviruses. The story of Ebola is close- ly connected with that of Marburg, according to a seasoned South African virologist named Rob- ert Swanepoel, who has long studied them both. “The two are interlinked,” he said, as we sat before acomputer screen in his Pretoria home, looking at photographs from his archive. Swane- poel, who hides a genial heart within a bearish exterior, is retired from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), in Johan- nesburg, where he ran the Special Pathogens
Unit for 24 years, but is still busy with research and bristling with ideas and memories.
Back in 1967, nine years before Ebola itself was recognized, a shipment of Ugandan mon- keys intended for medical research arrived in Frankfurt and Marburg, in West Germany, and Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, bringing with them an unknown but dangerous virus. Laboratory workers became infected in each place, and then, secondarily, some family members and health workers. Among 32 confirmed cases, seven peo- ple died. The new virus, a spooky, filamentous thing, like a strand of toxic vermicelli, was given the name Marburg virus. Eight years later an Australian student died of Marburg virus disease in a Johannesburg hospital after a hitchhiking trip across Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He and his girlfriend—she got sick too but recovered— had done a few things that might have exposed them to infection: slept on the ground in a pas- ture, bought some raw eland meat, fed some caged monkeys. And they had visited the Chin- hoyi Caves, a complex of caverns and sinkholes in northern Rhodesia that, like many caves in Africa, have been known to harbor bats. Along the way the hitchhiker also sustained some sort of insect or spider bite, which raised a painful red welt on his back. Investigation of his case in the immediate aftermath focused much on the bite, little on the caves.
Two other early cases of Marburg virus dis- ease did cast some suspicion on caves and the bats that roost within them. In 1980 a French engineer who worked at a sugar factory near the base of Mount Elgon, in western Kenya, ventured into Kitum Cave, a deep passage into the volcanic rock of the mountain sometimes entered by elephants looking for salt. The en- gineer’s cave visit was evidently a bad idea; he died of Marburg in a Nairobi hospital. In 1987 a Danish schoolboy climbed the mountain and explored the same cave during a family vaca- tion, and he died of an infection with a virus (now known as Ravn virus) closely related to Marburg. These events engaged the notice of Swanepoel, down in Johannesburg. In 1995 came another outbreak—Ebola this time, not
EBOLA 41
Marburg—centered on the city of Kikwit in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The chain of human-to-human infections, which totaled 315 cases and 254 deaths, began with a man who farmed manioc and made charcoal in a forest area at the city’s edge. Swanepoel flew to Kikwit, joining an in- ternational team of responders. He came down with malaria, went home, recovered, and in early 1996, with the support of the World Health Or- ganization, returned. His primary task was to look for the reservoir host, searching the same ecosystem where the outbreak had begun at the same time of year. “Already by that stage,” he told me, “bats were on my mind.”
Swanepoel and his crew at Kikwit took blood and tissue not only from bats but also from a wide selection of other animals, including many insects. Screening those samples back at his lab in Johannesburg, he found no evidence of Ebola. So he tried an experimental approach, one that seemed almost maniacally thorough. Working in NICD’s high-containment suite—biosafety level 4 (BSL-4), the highest—he personally in- jected live Ebola virus from the Kikwit outbreak into 24 kinds of plants and 19 kinds of animals, ranging from spiders and millipedes to lizards, birds, mice, and bats, and then monitored their condition over time. Though Ebola failed to take hold in most of the organisms, a low level of the virus—which had survived but probably hadn’t replicated—was detected in a single spider, and bats sustained Ebola virus infection for at least 12 days. One of those bats was a fruit bat. An- other was an Angolan free-tailed bat, the same little insectivore that would later catch Fabian Leendertz’s attention in Méliandou. It was proof of principle, though not of fact: These creatures could be reservoir hosts.
Ten Thousand Haystacks
The events in Kikwit highlighted an important difference between Marburg and Ebola viruses that has persisted: Whereas outbreaks of Mar- burg virus disease usually begin around caves and mines, Ebola virus disease outbreaks usu- ally begin with hunting and carcass scavenging,
42 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « JULY 2015
EACH HUMAN OUTBREAK SEEMED TOSTART WITH ONE UNFORTUNATE PERSON, USUALLY
A HUNTER.
Ebola outbreaks usually occur in isolated villages connected by bad roads and trails, such as this one in the DRC. The 2014 outbreak in West Africa was different—
it quickly spread to urban areas.
which are forest activities. This suggests the two viruses may emerge from two different kinds of reservoir hosts—or if bats are the hosts, two different kinds of bats, cave roosters and tree roosters.
The pattern was reaffirmed during a cluster of Marburg outbreaks from 1998 to 2000, centered on a derelict gold-mining town called Durba, in the DRC. Bob Swanepoel led another expe- dition and found multiple chains of infection, most or all of which started with miners who worked underground. Miners who worked at open pits in the daylight were far more likely to stay healthy. This led Swanepoel to suspect cave-roosting Egyptian fruit bats as the virus source, though he didn’t publish his suspicion at the time.
Then, beginning in late 2001 and extending into 2008, another series of small, indepen- dent outbreaks—of Ebola again, not Marburg— afflicted villagers in the densely forested borderlands of Gabon and the Republic of the Congo (which are west of the DRC, on the other side of the Congo River). Roughly 300 people became infected; almost 80 percent died. Mean- while gorillas, chimpanzees, and duikers, small forest antelopes, started turning up dead in the same region. Each human outbreak seemed to start with an unfortunate person, usually a
hunter, who'd handled an animal carcass.
“People were dying, and different animals were dying,” said Janusz Paweska, nowadays Swanepoel’s successor as head of Special Patho- gens at NICD, when I visited him in Johannes- burg. “So we thought, This is a good time to hunt for the Ebola reservoir.”
Swanepoel enlisted Paweska and others, then arranged a partnered expedition with Eric Le- roy, a French virologist based in Gabon who had responded to earlier Ebola outbreaks there. He met with Leroy in Gabon’s capital, Libreville, before heading into the field.
“T gave him a long story about how histor- ically bats have been involved in Ebola and Marburg,” Swanepoel told me. His team, he informed Leroy, had found fragments of Mar- burg, for instance, in the underground bats at Durba. Swanepoel had brought rodent traps, mist nets, and other collecting gear to Gabon. “Although I was fixated on bats, I said we had to cover everything,” he recalled. That would include a variety of mammals, birds, mosqui- toes, biting midges, and other insects. Swane- poel’s group took home a third of the specimens
and sent a third to the CDC in Atlanta, leaving a third to be tested by Leroy. The processing moved slowly in Swanepoel’s lab and at the CDC, amid many other projects, and yielded no positives, “We drew a blank.”
But Leroy’s group went back. Eventually his team made three field trips to the border area, capturing and sampling more than a thousand animals, including 679 bats, on which Leroy too was now fixated. In 16 of those bats, belonging to three different fruit-eating species, they found antibodies—proteins marshaled by the immune system—that had reacted against Ebola virus. In 18 other fruit bats they detected very short fragments of Ebola RNA. It’s important to note that those two kinds of evidence, antibodies and viral fragments, are analogous to finding the footprints of a Yeti in snow. You might or might not have something real. Isolating live virus—that is, growing fresh and infectious Ebo- la from a tissue sample—is the higher standard of evidence, almost like finding a real Yeti’s foot attached to a real Yeti in a leghold trap. Leroy’s group didn’t succeed in growing live virus from any samples. Still, in (Continued on page 52)
EBOLA 43
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Two hunters wearing camouflage stalk monkeys in a forest in northeastern ea DRC. Hunting isn’t always about subsistence; the sale of bush meat sometimes provides cash for educa- tion and health care as well as spending money. \
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A GRIEF TOO CLOSE
Yalala Therese sleeps beside her dead brother, laid out for his wake. The je}ce)tal-1mel(e lam ae |[-Me) a =10\e)- 0 but if he had, such close contact—a common practice in West Africa as well as the DRC—would have risked infection.
DETAILED BELOW CURRENT EBOLA OUTBREAK
March 2014-present”
Deaths 3,876
SOUTH 12,241 Genes 2 AFRICA a =r
Out of the Jungle
Previous outbreaks occurred in sparsely populated forests in central Africa, where Ebola was less likely to spread. The 2014 outbreak in West African cities has infected more people than all previous outbreaks
of the past 40 years combined. Okm 60
“TOTAL CONFIRMED, PROBABLE, AND SUSPECTED CASES AND DEATHS AS OF APRIL 19, 2015. WHO REPORTED THE FIRST CASES IN MARCH 2014.
Range of Angolan free-tailed bat": (Mops condylurus) *
in 1976, erupted simultane- ously in what was then Sudan (now South Sudan) and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Outbreaks Current Ebola
@ ceaths
—Cases Past cases @ Ebola viruses 1976-2012 @ Marburg 1975-2012
Total cases or deaths 3,000
2,000
1,000
Tree-cover density
More Less ‘Urban area
Om 200 bop
Okm 200
A Family of Viruses
Besides Ebola itself, which is responsible for most outbreaks, four other viruses are recognized within the ebolavirus group: Sudan, Tai Forest, Bundibugyo, and Reston. All cause Ebola virus disease, except Reston, which is probably harmless to humans. Marburg, a closely related pathogen, was discovered in 1967. Marburg virus disease is also often fatal.
AN ELUSIVE ENEMY
No one knows for certain where the Ebola virus lurks between outbreaks; it has never been definitively tracked to a host species in the wild. Transmission to humans has been sporadic and extremely rare—but all too often deadly. Fatality rates in some outbreaks have reached 90 percent. Since Ebola was discovered in 1976, population growth in at-risk countries has nearly tripled, and people have become more mobile.
The Path to Humans
Three bat species have long been suspected of har- boring Ebola. But one theory suggests a two-host system, in which the virus's ultimate host—perhaps some insect, tick, or other arthropod—must first in- fect a bat or other mammal. The virus can then pass to humans, typically when they handle bush meat.
POSSIBLE RESERVOIRS
—o~ wa &Y 7
Insectivorous bats Fruit bats Unknown
Other species
Gorilla
SUSCEPTIBLE SPECIES
LAUREN E. JAMES, EMILY M.ENG, AND JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF; MEG ROOSEVELT
‘SOURCES: WHO; CDG; IUCN; DAVID M. PIGOTT, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; GLOBAL LAND COVER FACILITY; LANDSCAN
2005 the journal Nature published a paper on these results, written by Leroy but with Swane- poel and Paweska credited as co-authors, titled “Fruit Bats as Reservoirs of Ebola Virus.” That paper, though cautious and provisional, is the primary source for all those careless, overly cer- tain assertions you've seen in the popular media during the past year to the effect that Ebola vi- rus resides in fruit bats.
Possibly it does. Or not. The paper itself says maybe.
“You tried to isolate live virus?” I asked Le- roy during my stop in Gabon. He’s a courteous, dapper Frenchman, now director of the Cen- tre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville, who works in a white shirt and dark tie, at least when he’s not wearing a full protec- tive suit in his BSL-4 lab or Tyvek coveralls in the forest. “Yes. Many, many, many times trying to isolate the virus,” he said. “But I never could. Because it was—the viral load was very, very low.” Viral load is the quantity of virus in the solid tissues or blood of the creature, and it tends to be much lower in a reservoir host than in an animal or person suffering an acute infection.
That’s just one of three reasons why finding a reservoir host is difficult, Leroy explained. The second is that, in addition to low viral load within each animal, the virus may exist at low prevalence within a population. Prevalence is the percentage of positive individuals at a given time, and if that happens to be as little as one animal in a hundred, then “the probability to detect and to catch this infected animal is very low.” If a single kind of animal amid the great diversity of tropical forests represents a nee- dle in a haystack, then one infected individual within one population of animals amid such diversity represents one needle in ten thousand haystacks.
And the third constraint on the search for a reservoir host? “It’s extremely expensive,” Le- roy said.
The Perfect Holiday The cost of field operations in remote forest lo- cations, as well as the competing demands upon
52 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « JULY 2015
THE URGENCY OF HUMAN NEEDS IN AN OUTBREAK MAKES SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS DIFFICULT.
A Freetown couple mourns asa burial worker removes their day-old baby’s body. The infant likely died of other causes, but officials ordered that all deaths in heavily affected areas be treated as cases of Ebola.
institutional resources, has hindered even vet- eran researchers such as Swanepoel and Leroy from mounting long-term, continuous studies of the Ebola reservoir question. Instead there have been short expeditions, organized quickly during an outbreak or just as a crisis was end- ing. But going to the site of a human outbreak to do research on the ecology of the virus is lo- gistically nightmarish and, as I’ve mentioned, offensive to local people. So those expeditions get delayed. The problem with delay is that the prevalence of Ebola virus within its host pop- ulation, the viral load within individual hosts, and the abundance of virus being shed into the environment may all fluctuate seasonally. Miss the right season, and you might miss the virus.
Fabian Leendertz tried to address these dif- ficulties by organizing a second field expedi- tion, this one at roughly the same season as the fateful spillover that killed Emile Ouamouno, but a year later and in neighboring Ivory Coast. Angolan free-tailed bats are abundant there too, roosting beneath the roofs of village houses. Their very abundance in such close proximity to people suggests a further perplexing ques- tion, if the little-bat hypothesis is correct: With the virus so near, why don’t spillovers occur far more often? Leendertz wanted to trap those bats, as many as possible, and sample them for
evidence of Ebola. Photographer Pete Muller and I went with him.
Leendertz and his team, including a gradu- ate student named Ariane Diix, focused on two villages outside the city of Bouaké, a trade hub near the country’s center. After shopping for trap materials in Bouaké’s market, scouting the villages for bat-filled houses, and paying respects to village elders, the team assembled their apparatus late one afternoon, in time for the fly out at dusk. The traps were cone-shaped structures, jerry-built of long boards and trans- lucent plastic sheeting, designed to capture bats as they emerged from a roof hole and funnel them down into a plastic tub. Amazingly, the system worked. At 6:25 p.m. on the first evening one trap came alive like a popcorn popper, as dozens of small gray bodies slid down the sheet- ing and thumped into the tub.
For the next phase Leendertz and Diix suited up in medical gloves, respirator masks, gowns, and visors. With a naked lightbulb hanging above their makeshift lab table, they began pro- cessing bats: weighing and measuring each an- imal, noting sex and approximate age, injecting
an electronic chip the size of a caraway seed for later identification, and most important, draw- ing blood from a vein in the animal’s tiny arm. One well-aimed poke with a delicate needle, and ablood drop would appear, to be gathered witha fine pipette. Diix and Leendertz worked together at close range, trustingly sharing tasks, and it oc- curred to me that if she poked twice at the vein and missed the second time, jabbing Leendertz’s finger instead, he could have an Ebola-related needle-stick injury. But she didn’t miss.
The blood went into small vials, for freezing immediately in a liquid-nitrogen tank and even- tual screening back in Berlin. A small fraction of all the captured bats would be killed and dis- sected, so that snippets of their internal organs, especially liver and spleen, where viruses often concentrate, could be added to the trove of fro- zen samples. The other bats would be released. If a blood sample from one dissected individ- ual later tested positive for antibodies or viral fragments, its organs would then be used in an attempt (more dangerous and more expensive, done only in a BSL-4 laboratory) to isolate live Ebola virus.
EBOLA 53
LAID TO REST
Gravediggers pause Elicia Welle mela umerwVg at the Freetown King Tom Cemetery. As the epidemic peaked, in November 2014, the cemetery averaged some 50 burials a day.
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The search for Ebola’s hiding place led Fabian Leendertz to gather blood and tissue from an Angolan free-tailed bat (above). Leendertz (right, with flashlight) and local men examine a roosting site of the same small bat, above the ceiling of a house in an Ivory Coast village.
After a few bats Leendertz stepped back from the processing work and allowed an Ivor- ian graduate student, Leonce Kouadio, tall, mild mannered, and thin as a candle, to take his place. This was a training mission as well as ascientific investigation, after all, and Leen- dertz wanted to give his protégés a richness of experience. Kouadio had good skills already, and as he got into rhythm, sharing these exact- ing tasks in the warm African night, I noticed the T-shirt beneath his medical gown, which carried some sort of resort logo and said, IT’s THE PERFECT HOLIDAY. For him, maybe, but not for everybody.
A Strange Host Back in the United States, I spoke with more experts during a stop at the CDC in Atlanta and
58 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
by telephone. When I asked why it’s important to identify the reservoir host of Ebola virus, they all agreed: because that information is essential to preventing future outbreaks. On other points they diverged. The most unexpected comment came from Jens Kuhn, a brainy young virologist now at the National Institutes of Health and, by way of his tome Filoviruses, arguably the pre- eminent historian of Ebola. I’ve known Kuhn as a candid source but also a lively and gener- ous friend since we met at a conference hosted by Eric Leroy. Why do you think that after 39 years, I asked him, the reservoir of Ebola is still unidentified?
“Tt’s a strange host.”
“A strange host,” I repeated, not sure I’d heard right.
“That’s what I think.”
His logic was complex, but he sketched it concisely. First, outbreaks of Ebola virus dis- ease have been relatively infrequent—only about two dozen in nearly 40 years. Rare oc- currences. Almost every one was traceable toa single human case, infected from the wild, fol- lowed by human-to-human transmission. This
suggests, he said, that the sequence of events yielding spillover has to be “extraordinary and weird.” Highly unusual circumstances, an un- likely convergence of factors. Second, there’s “the remarkable genome stability of the virus over the years.” It didn’t change much, didn’t evolve much, at least until the human case count in West Africa started going so high, pro- viding many more opportunities for the virus to mutate. That stability might reflect “a bot- tleneck somewhere,” Kuhn said—a constrain- ing situation that keeps the virus scarce and its genetic diversity low. One possible form of bottleneck would be a two-host system: a mam- mal host such as a bat species that becomes infected only intermittently, when it gets bitten by a certain insect or tick or other arthropod,
ONE MORE THING
While on assignment for this story, photographer Pete Muller also shot four stories about West Africa’s Ebola outbreak for nationalgeographic.com He lives in Nairobi, Kenya
REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF
perhaps relatively rare or narrowly distributed, which is the ultimate host of the virus. As we both knew, this harked back to that hitchhiker in Rhodesia in 1975 who suffered an odd little bite and then died of Marburg, It evoked the spider in Bob Swanepoel’s lab that carried Ebo- la for two weeks.
What would you do, I asked him, if you hada big research grant for nothing but finding Ebo- la’s reservoir? Kuhn laughed.
“I’m going to make myself unpopular,” he said, “but I would still look into insects and other arthropods.”
He doesn’t have that big grant, nor does any- one else. The mystery remains. The stakes are high. The samples from Ivory Coast have so far yielded no positives. The search continues. 0
> Did fear of catching the virus ever prevent you from getting close to your subjects? Yes. | thought it would be pow- erful to show home care,
but it’s so dangerous to be in a house with some- body who is actively sick and still alive. There are certain things that are just really inadvisable to do.
EBOLA 59
The Future of Food natgeofood.com
This story is part of National Geographic's Future of Food initiative, a special five-year project that seeks to show how what we eat makes us who we are.
~~ Howa Los Angeles chef took a crazy idea and helped launch a food movement on wheels
@RiceBallsOfFire Twitter st their
Trucks use to broadc
daily locations such as this car show and race in Fontana, California Posing in front of
the Rice Ba truck, r McEwen dis fare from nearby
of Fire
@Berlinfoodtruck.
By David Brindley Photographs by Gerd Ludwig
t’s 10 p.m. on a chilly Saturday in Los Angeles. Some 30 people, braving 48°F weather—hat-and-scarf cold for L.A.—line up along the sidewalk in front ofa converted step van parked on the street. The windows
slide open, and the phenomenon that is the Kogi BBQ food truck kicks into high gear.
Kogi BBQ has been drawing crowds, and accolades, since 2008, when two friends hatched a plan to fuse Korean barbecue with Mex- ican tacos and then hawk them froma truck on L.A’s streets. Food trucks aren’t new to the city’s land- scape. For decades they've offered cheap eats along roadsides and at construction sites across southern California. But they were often disparaged as “roach coaches.” So a Korean-taco truck was “a crazy idea,” writes Kogi BBQ founder Roy Choi in his memoir, L.A. Son.
That idea turned out to be “ge- nius and ingenious,” says Barbara Fairchild, former editor of Bon Ap- pétit and a longtime L.A. resident. The genius came in the kitchen.
Choi, 45, was born in Korea and immigrated with his family to L.A. when he was two. Drawing on
flavors from his native cuisine— fused with Mexican dishes—and his top-notch chef training from the Culinary Institute of America, he concocted the deeply flavored car- amelized short-rib barbecue and smoky-spicy salsas that top two crisp corn tortillas. The resulting tacos, what Choi calls “Los Angeles on a plate,” were an instant culi- nary classic. Through his simple yet revolutionary cooking, Choi un- leashed the power of food to cross cultures and race.
“T picked up on the feeling that food was important,” he writes, “and not just a meal to fuel yourself to do something else.”
What put Kogi on the map, though, was its early adoption of social media to lure customers. Ini- tially Kogi’s small crew didn’t have much luck selling to buzzed late- night bar-hoppers outside night- clubs on Sunset Boulevard. Then the team tapped into the emerging
ONAROLL 63
64 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
efeye| Tru res k 2014 Revenue in the U.S. Getting a Business Rolling NELt (ey cH is rain
Food trucks are no passing fad.
Serving freshly cooked food LAY eder= UAL tame] osser-| (Male |=ce | N S ents at affordable prices,
they’re now part of the urban landscape across the country.
an vary depending on t! aurant, but setting t
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Their phenomenal growth since s an feantly SS eens e than 2008 has been fueled by the eee strength of social media:
Outfitting a Truck
Trucks use Twitter and Face- book to update their locations and attract customers. Low The dood truck start-up costs, compared with grown 80% sir restaurants, also allow entre- nie a ae preneurial chefs to enter this
booming food industry. In that respect, food trucks can act as
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Customers at Food Trucks
Share of people in the U.S. who have
Food Followers Social Stats a Tracking t on Twitter is the best means of charting industry growth aS
in cities across the country. ; 50/ Top five U.S. cities with t r t truc Twitter j
205 Los Angeles, CA truc ross 236 U.S. cities,
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MATTHEW TWOMBLY, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: TODD SCHIFELING, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; DAPHNE DEMETRY, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY; ROAMING HUNGER; NATIONAL RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION
power of social media. Using Twitter—a mobile app that allows users to share short messages with friends and followers—Kogi con- stantly updated customers on its changing location. A groundswell of young, plugged-in urbanites appeared, tracking Kogi’s where- abouts. Within months Kogi was attracting hundreds of customers— and dishing out up to 400 pounds of meat—at several stops every day. Newsweek called it “America’s first
Jen Ju @jenjunaicha
TODAY THOUSANDS of upscale food trucks roam city streets from San Francisco to Austin to Wash- ington, D.C., broadcasting their whereabouts to sell everything from bespoke grilled cheese sand- wiches and luxurious lobster rolls to handcrafted ice-cream cones and freshly popped popcorn. What seemed to be a passing fad is now a growing, $800 million annual industry.
It has spawned books and apps
You know | only joined Twitter back in the day to follow @kogibbq when they didn’t have a calendar/schedule...
viral eatery.” Kogi BBQ now has 132,000 followers, and its fleet has expanded to four roaming trucks anda truck stall at LAX airport. Oddly enough, the economic downturn in 2008 was an ideal in- cubator for the supply and demand for food trucks. Chefs and entrepre- neurs supplied talent and passion to start food truck businesses at a fraction of the cost of opening a restaurant. On the demand side, diners strapped by a tanking econ- omy were willing to plunk down up to ten bucks for authentic, creative dishes that were a bargain com- pared with high-end restaurant prices. Social media then connected trucks and customers to forge an entirely new food movement.
© ONE MORE THING
Longtime contributing photographer Gerd Ludwig (@GerdLudwig) lives in Los Angeles and feels a kinship with food truck owners: “Like me, they have to be flexible, open, and able to react on the spot.”
DOUGLAS KIRKLAND (ABOVE); REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF
and even, last year, a Hollywood movie. Chef stars Jon Favreau as a disgraced former chef who buys a truck and finds redemption slinging Cuban sandwiches on a cross-country road trip with his social-media-savvy son. (Choi makes an appearance during the credits, teaching Favreau to make a grilled cheese sandwich.) And an American invasion of food trucks, dishing up favorites, including, yes, Korean tacos, has arrived in Milan, Italy, for this year’s World’s Fair. Yet even in a booming industry, it’s a tough business. “You can’t just show up and expect to make a lot of money running a food truck,” says Ross Resnick, founder of Roaming Hunger, a smartphone app that
L.A. native David Brindley (@wordies) is managing editor of National Geographic. “The less romantic side of street food,” he says, “is finding yourself scarfing tacos at a bus stop because there’s nowhere else to sit.”
ONAROLL 67
@eatsonofabun
Halloween partyers enjoy freshly made meals from food trucks at local public radio KCRW’s annual masquerade ball. The fund-raiser features several bands and is held on the grounds of L.A.’s Park Plaza Hotel. Special events guarantee customers— and cash—for area food truck businesses.
70 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « JULY 2015
TheLobosTru @ptcov
angieswieners @fryfryfoodtruck
maps real-time locations of hun- dreds of food trucks in cities across the country. “You have to have a brand and a strategy.”
More often than not, branding starts with a punny name: Banh in the USA (Vietnamese sand- wiches), Belly BombZ (spicy chick- en wings), Dog Gone It (hot dogs), Ragin’ Cajun (Creole), Waff-N-Roll (waffle sandwiches). Strategy often involves finding a niche, as did the Polka Pierogi Truck, which makes
Mrs. J @mrsjjohnston
Props to @dogzillahotdogs for the recommendations!!! Yakisoba and an egg on my hot dog? Yes please!
@pienburger
At Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, the Pie 'n Burger food truck (bottom right) provides food and drink to tutu’ed participants in the Epilepsy Founda- tion's fund-raising walk Snapping photos and sharing via social media (top right) are as much a part of street food culture as the food itself.
Sunday-morning pilgrimages to a predominantly Polish church.
Branding also is emblazoned on the trucks themselves. Leaving be- hind bare, quilted-aluminum siding, today’s trucks are heavily adorned with graphics, spray-painted art, stickers. Their exteriors are almost as heavily tattooed as the typical young chefs working in the trucks’ cramped interior kitchens—roughly the size of two large dining tables.
Although trucks strive to make their brands unique, there’s also strength in numbers. Many trucks congregate in high-pedestrian ar- eas. On any given day, a dozen or more trucks line up at lunchtime along Wilshire Boulevard across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With office buildings on one side and the muse- um on the other, trucks can rely on asteady stream of customers.
One busy Monday, hundreds of office workers and visitors chose from a veritable smorgasbord on wheels, from Azteca Mexican
72 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
dishes to Chow Mein Chinese food, Dogtown hot dogs, Kabob Kings, and Roadhouse Rotisserie barbe- cue. Venice Beach’s trendy Abbot Kinney Boulevard hosts a bustling food truck rally every first Friday of the month. Food flies fast at the festival, and trucks can bring in thousands of dollars in business. That’s a lot of two-dollar tacos.
BACK AT THE KOGI BBQ truck on that cold Saturday night, the line slowly
snakes forward but stretches lon- ger and longer as more customers arrive. Smartphones in hand, the mostly hipster crowd snap photos of their tacos and send tweets. A mur- mur rumbles through the crowd that the truck has run out of kim- chi, the spicy fermented cabbage that’s a staple in Korean cuisine. No problem. There’s plenty else on the menu, though people aren’t neces- sarily here just for the food. Drifting along with the scent of spicy grilled meat is a whiff of community, a sub- tle sense of camaraderie in a shared experience.
There’s a social nature to lines. Strangers spark conversations. A young couple from Cleveland on a California holiday reveal they drove two hours to stand in line. The pair ahead admit they walked two blocks from their home, dog in tow, for a quick Kogi fix. The couples share laughs, stories. They order, they get their food, they dig in. Simple, soulful, satisfying. That’s not sucha crazy idea after all. O
@ChiliPhilosophy
Down-home dishes meet high-end, locally sourced ingredients in the Chili Philosopher's $11 Triple Beef Chili n’ Cornbread combo. A strong brand identity and an aggressive social media strategy are essential to differentiate trucks in an increasingly crowded marketplace. That, and delicious food.
@CHILIPHILOSOPHER
@CHILIPHILOSOPHY
Orcas hunt for herring in Norway’s Andfjorden. Members of the pod coor- dinate their moves, herding a mass
of herring into a manageable ball. They then whip their tails against the ball, stunning or killing the fish.
76
tet hen Orcas show their smarts by working together to whip up a meal.
An adult male orca helps herd a school of herring in the deep waters of Andfjorden. Male orcas’ tall dorsal fins distinguish them from females. Some members of the pod bunch the herring together as others feed.
By Virginia Morell Photographs by Paul Nicklen
UNDERSTANDING DOLPHINS
INTELLIGENCE CAPTIVITY @* CULTURE
a three-part series
here are no orcas to speak of in Western literature. Although
they look like mythic creatures, with their sleek bodies,
panda-like colors, and pointy-toothed grins, killer whales
don’t figure as characters in our great novels. There’s no
orca equivalent of Moby Dick, the great white whale.
Many of us, though, do have an image of orcas, one informed by films of them performing in aquarium shows, such as those at SeaWorld— swimming in endless circles in tiny, sterile pools or leaping for our amusement. Some think cap- tive orcas suffer severe psychological trauma from their sadly shrunken lives.
And that’s heartbreaking, because when you're out with orcas in the wild, you sense what no show can ever capture: their spirit and sagacity, their joy and cunning, their love of the open ocean and of hunting and of life.
On a cold January day I was surrounded by hundreds of black-and-white killer whales— Orcinus orca, not a whale but rather the largest dolphin—streaking like wolves through the wa- ters of Norway’s Andfjorden, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Their backs and tall dorsal fins glistened in the Arctic twilight as they dived and surfaced and worked in teams to corral, stun, and devour silver herring.
At times an orca would smack the surface with its tail, as if playing patty-cake with the sea. Or- cas make similar tail strikes underwater—death knells for herring, said Tiu Simila, a cetacean bi- ologist who helped pioneer the study of orcas
80 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « JULY 2015
in Norway and is an expert on an orca hunting method called carousel feeding. The force of the blows doesn’t always kill the fish, she said, but it does stun many, making them easy pickings. “What we're seeing here at the surface only gives ahint of what’s happening below,” she said. “Each whale has a role. It’s like a ballet, so they have to move in a very coordinated way and communi- cate and make decisions about what to do next.”
In spite of the numbers of herring, it isn’t easy for the orcas to catch the fish, which are faster swimmers and form defensive, wall-like schools. Orcas can’t just lunge at them and gulp quantities of fish and seawater as baleen whales do. Instead, like sheepdogs working a flock, they herd the schools into tight groups they can control. “The orcas have to stop the fish from diving,” Simila said, “so they force them to the surface and keep them there in a ball by circling around them.”
Pod members take turns diving beneath the school and looping around it—an orca carousel— while blowing bubbles, calling, and flashing their white bellies to frighten the herring. In response the fish swim even more tightly together. When a carousel is going full tilt, her- ring leap about on top of the water, desperately
Orcas prefer to hunt herring where they can force them toward the surface, as in the pale shallows of this branch of Andfjorden.
trying to escape. “It looks as if the sea is boiling,” Simila said.
Once the pod has the herring under control, one orca slams the edge of the school with its tail—serving up dinner.
But the orcas we were watching weren’t en- gagedina c carousel. They were swimming and diving fore and aft of a mass of fish but not circling beneath them. Even though the sea’s surface wasn’t boiling with fish, the orcas were feasting. Their tail strikes, the stunned and dead bodies of herring, and all the fish scales floating in the water like silver coins told Simila that.
CAROUSEL FEEDING Is one of several orca hunt- ing tactics that some scientists, Simila included, consider one aspect of the species’ “cultures,” which include strategies for particular kinds of prey. In Argentina, orcas hurl themselves on- shore to seize unsuspecting sea lion pups, timing their hunts to coincide with the waves and tides so that they won’t be beached long. In the Ant- arctic, pod members cooperate to make large waves that wash seals from ice floes. Younger orcas learn these techniques from older ones. Orcas haven’t been documented, however,
cooperatively hunting with whales. Indeed orcas prey on sperm, gray, fin, humpback, and many other whales, which is why whalers called them killers of whales. It’s also why Simila was per- plexed. Normally the orca pods here fished alone, but on this day humpbacks and fins were swim- ming among the orcas and eating the herring too. Around us dorsal fins of various shapes and hues broke the water. Orcas shot past, rounding up herring, while humpbacks hurtled skyward, jaws agape, gulping fish before the orcas could pick them off, and the fin whales merely showed their curved fins as they caught a quick breath before sinking back into the depths to feast.
“T’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “Are they all working together to catch the fish?”
Because humpbacks use a method similar to carousel feeding—circling a school of fish or krill, then blowing bubbles to herd them into a ball—Simila thought they might be cooperat- ing with the orcas. Or the orcas and the whales might be “travel feeding,” simply herding the immense school into a tighter group, then slapping the edge of the herring ball for a quick meal before moving on. “But travel feeding takes more energy than the carousel,” Simila
DOLPHIN CULTURE 81
CAROUSEL FEEDING (Norway)
Splitting
In winter waters off the coast of Norway, killer whales work as a team—often in groups of three to nine—to round up herring. They're in constant communication, and their first step is to split a group of fish from the larger school.
®
—— = ES ae = — nm — = = e P A y Herring school A 4
s .
I
Orcas push the fish ball upward, trapping it against the surface.
Sp, ed: 5 knots
HOW THEY HUNT
An orca matriarch leads her pod as it herds a group of herring into a tight ball and pushes it toward the surface. Malic creualalle[U-mmer-ll(-1e Mer-IcolUl-i-1(-1-(0 [ale PM (UIs) Mola |-Mene many inventive methods used by killer whales in different parts of the world when hunting and capturing their prey.
WAVE WASHING (Antarctic waters)
Orcas swim in groups of up to seven toward ice floes,
creating waves that break the floes into smaller pieces and eventually wash Weddell seals, a favored prey, off the ice and into the path of pod members lying in wait.
> “ ae
- = ‘
AN
Herding
Swimming in fast circles, the orcas herd the smaller group of herring into a tightening ball, making it easier to control and harder for fish to escape. Orcas blow bubbles, flash their bellies, and slap the surface with their tails (lobtailing) to scare their prey.
Orcas maneuver so that their white undersides face the herring
BEACHING (Punta Norte, Argentina, and Crozet Islands, Indian Ocean)
Killer whales chase sea lions or seals into the churning surf, catching them just before they reach the shore. Orcas are generally able to time their attacks and angle their bodies to avoid stranding themselves for long.
whip their tails sharply into the ball, ‘killing many fi s the stunned and
Female
j
Mature female orcas lead pods and teach calves tail-slapping techniques.
Some herring escape the rising ball of fish
by breaking away and swimming downward,
i a Calf ad DRIVING TO EXHAUSTION (Strait of Gibraltar)
Using the “endurance-exhaustion” technique, groups of orcas pursue prey, primarily small- to medium-size bluefin tuna, for as long as 30 minutes at a sustained speed of up to seven knots, pushing the tuna beyond their limits.
A less common hunting technique in these same waters entails
herding the fish toward shore and trapping them in the shallows or against the land before feasting.
Stunned herring
A]
Upper 65 feet of water
FERNANDO G. BAPTISTA, DANIELA ‘SANTAMARINA, AND EMILY M. ENG, NGM ‘STAFF; TONY SCHICK. TEXT: EVE CONANT, NGM STAFF
SOURCES: TIU SIMILA; ROBERT PITMAN, NOAA; PAOLO DOMENICI, CNR-IAMG, ITALY
An orca moves into position to help nudge a tight ball of herring toward the surface. After herring at the edge of the ball have been stunned, orcas feed, not taking big gulps of the fish but picking them off one by one.
said. “And with so many herring here, a carousel would seem to make more sense.”
But the orcas never lingered long enough to carousel feed. They, the humpbacks, and the fins continued to rush past us as if speeding to a gala event, stopping now and then to snack. When we turned back toward our home base, a handsome yacht called the Ylajali, the moon was up, and the milky seas still rippled with whales on the move.
ORCAS, MEMBERS of the Delphinidae family, the marine dolphins, are the most widely distrib- uted of all cetacean species. Yet despite being found in every ocean, often close to shore and at every latitude, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, they remain a mystery. We don’t even know how many full-fledged species and subspecies are rep- resented in the rough estimate of their overall population, which is thought to be at least 50,000.
Is that a healthy number? Or are they en- dangered? No one knows, because researchers
disrupted this pattern, and for a time orcas van- ished from Norway’s fjords. In the early 1980s herring populations rebounded, and orcas were again spotted in fjords south of Andfjorden. Simila, who’s originally from Finland, was then a graduate student, researching plankton in Finnish lakes. She heard that Norwegian biolo- gists were starting orca safaris and volunteered to work on their boats. On her first day a male orca’s tall dorsal fin pierced the water beside the rubber dinghy she was riding in. The sight left her speechless—and erased all thoughts of plankton. She switched to orcas the next day.
For the next 20 years she followed the orcas every winter as they headed into the fjords in pursuit of herring. She and her colleagues pho- tographed as many orcas as they could so that they could identify individuals, and they snor- keled with and filmed them as they fed.
“In those days nothing was really known about these orcas,” Simila said. “People were
“One orca traveled so far and so fast—hundreds of kilometers in one day—we thought he was being
pulled away by a ship.”
began counting them only in the 1970s and aren’t sure how many are found in each of the ecotypes now recognized. Here in the North Atlantic there may be multiple ecotypes; Simila and I were observing orcas that specialize in feeding on herring. These orcas range across the Norwegian and Barents Seas and were estimated at around 3,000 in 1990. About a thousand of them—Simila and her colleagues call them Nor- wegian orcas—follow herring into the fjords. But herring aren’t predictable prey. Their numbers can vary dramatically from year to year, and they don’t live in the fjords year-round. They spawn along the coast in the spring, disperse into the Norwegian Sea in the summer to feed, and mi- grate in massive schools in the late autumn to an overwintering area, either off Norway’s coast or in its fjords. Wherever they go, the orcas follow.
Overfishing by humans in the early 1960s
86 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
—Tiu Simild, biologist
told that they were pests and dangerous—that they were eating all our fish.”
Fishermen shot orcas on sight, killing 346 between 1978 and 1981, when the official culls stopped. Many Norwegians continued to con- sider orcas rapacious herring-eaters until 1992. That year a television station aired footage from Simila’s study showing them daintily eating one fish at a time rather than gluttonously gulping down entire schools.
Orca pods that lost members to a shooter or had a wounded member appear to have nev- er forgotten. “You can see scars on some orcas from the bullets,” Simila said. “We could never get close to those pods. You still can’t. As soon as they hear a motor, they move away.”
Orca pods are led by the founding matri- arch, and Simila thinks these “wise mothers” teach their calves to avoid fishing boats, thus
preserving the pod’s memory. “I don’t know how they communicate this. Maybe they just lead the others away when they hear a boat’s motor. But they have some way of telling them, Look out—that’s bad, that’s dangerous.”
ONE DAY, AFTER SEEING ORCAS spouting on the far side of the fjord, we motored across the two- mile expanse of sea into a calm lagoon. “It’s a whale Eden,” our guide proclaimed as orca pods surged nearby, their dorsal fins riding like sails above the sea, and humpbacks lunged for fish. One pod’s calves playfully surfed in the wake of our boat and then, when the motor was idling, popped up nearby, like prairie dogs, to spy on us. Although these orcas weren’t streaming through the sea, as they'd done on our first day, they still weren’t carousel feeding.
Simila admired the way each orca had arole in the hunt. She’d seen how adults guided younger ones, how calves imitated their mothers’ tail slap- ping, how pods sometimes made long journeys to the herring’s spawning grounds, apparently to keep track of the fish. By attaching satellite tags to several of the orcas, she and her colleagues had mapped some scouting missions. “One of the orcas traveled so far and so fast—hundreds of kilometers in one day—we thought he was being pulled away by a ship,” she said. “Now I just laugh at myself for thinking such a thing.”
Simili tells an orca story that shows how little we know about them. In 1996 the team spotted acalf with a spine and dorsal fin that had been severely injured, probably from a boat strike.
“We named him Stumpy because of his dam- aged dorsal fin,” Simila said, adding that she doesn’t actually know whether the calf is amale or a female. “He's not like other killer whales. He can’t hunt, and they care for him.”
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y and June stories in thi ies? Find them on our @igitalplatforms.
MARTEN VAN DIJL, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Instead of living with a single pod, Stumpy swims with at least five different ones, all of which feed him. Once, Simila watched as two females came dashing through the waves, each carrying a large herring for Stumpy. She thinks the orcas understand that a boat injured him, because they keep him away from boats.
“Stumpy is the biggest mystery to me. I don’t know what will happen when he becomes sex- ually mature,” Simila said. “But the other orcas know he needs help, and they help him.”
Some researchers have suggested that an orca pod has such tight social bonds that its members respond to other animals and their environment as a single-minded group. That may be why entire pods strand when only one sick member heads for shore. And why some males die after the death of their mother. Per- haps it’s also why so many orcas help Stumpy.
When you've spent much of your life around beings that live in cooperative societies, remem- ber their past, and care for their weakest, you learn to be open to what else they might be ca- pable of. So Simila entertained the idea that the orcas had joined with the humpbacks and fins to hunt the fish.
She later changed her mind. “No, they’re not working together,” she told me in a phone conversation after I’d returned home. “Those humpbacks are just spoiling everything the orcas do. Every time the orcas get the herring organized, the humpbacks wreck it. The fin whales are taking advantage too.”
The orcas didn’t seem to mind. They nev- er made any effort to escape the freeloaders or fight them or chase them away. Maybe this equanimity was evidence simply of the abun- dance of herring in Andfjorden that winter— more than enough for all. 0
No stranger to brutal temperatures, Paul Nicklen grew up in the Canadi- an Arctic. This assignment had him diving in frigid waters up to 50 times a day—a job that might have been easier had he not had pneumonia.
CRISTINA MITTERMEIER
DOLPHIN CULTURE 87
As orcas get in place around a school of herring, they stay in close contact Niitamer=l (RU al (sid (<M ale M-1e1 ale) (efor Life) a) clicks. “Each whale has a role to play,” says Finnish biologist Tiu Simila, who follows the Norwegian orcas and herring most winters.
In the Footsteps of
GANDHI
India has moved on, but its Great Soul endures,
if you know where to look.
Freed from field labor, Geeta Bhen weaves a Sari fora women’s cooperative inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, in Sihol, Gujarat state.
91
A SMALL BODY OF
DETERMINED SPIRITS
FIRED BY AN
UNQUENCHABLE
FAITH IN THEIR
MISSION CAN ALTER THE
COURSE OF HISTORY.
—Gandhi
Workers harvest salt in Dharasana, Gujarat. In May 1930, the month after Gandhi led a march to protest British restrictions on salt, activists trained in nonviolent resistance marched here and were savagely beaten, a seminal event that advanced India’s drive for independence.
93
BY TOM O’NEILL PHOTOGRAPHS BY RENA EFFENDI
He woke before dawn, as he did every day at the ashram.
In the darkness he led a prayer meeting on a patch of ground overlooking the Sabarmati River. Then he was ready. Dressed in a long loincloth, or dhoti, with a shawl around his shoulders, he grasped a bamboo staff and started out the gate. He was leaving his home of 13 years, a commu- nity devoted to his precepts of plain living and high thinking.
Mohandas Gandhi was not alone. As he stepped onto a dirt road on the outskirts of Ah- madabad, the largest city in his native state of Gujarat, 78 men, two abreast, clad in white, fell into a column behind him. Pressing in on the sides of the road, hanging from trees, leaning from windows, tens of thousands of people—sup- porters and curious alike—cried, “Gandhi ki jai. Victory to Gandhi.”
The date was March 12, 1930. Gandhi and his troops walked for 25 days and 241 miles to the Arabian Sea to defy the unjust British law that prohibited the collection of salt in its colony. Master of the dramatic gesture, Gan- dhi bent over near the shore and scooped up a handful of salty mud. As illegal salt-gathering spread across the country, arrests and beat- ings followed. Gandhi was jailed for almost nine months. What authorities had dismissed as a minor act of political theater swelled into a nationwide cry for independence. A broad array of India’s population—high caste and low, male and female, Hindu and Muslim—for the first time joined in protest against British rule. Now the masses had a leader. From the day he began the Salt March until his death 18 years later, Gandhi infused India with a revo- lutionary blend of politics and spirituality. He
94 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ¢ JULY 2015
called his action-based philosophy satyagraha, or truth force.
Gandhi's impact was indelible. He guided India to independence. He forced his countrymen to question their deepest prejudices about caste and religion and violence.
Hours after Gandhi’s death from an assassin’s bullets in 1948, just five and a half months after the new nation was born, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, proclaimed that the light left behind by the Father of the Nation would shine a thousand years.
HOW BRIGHT does that light burn today?
To find out, I decided to follow Gandhi. “See me, please,” he said, “in the nakedness of my working, and in my limitations, you will then know me.” I would travel his route on the Salt March. The talks he delivered and the articles he wrote speak to issues that still confront India today, and Indians still debate the legacy of the man known as Mahatma, or Great Soul.
Prophet or holy fool? Hero or villain? Right path or dead end? No one questions Gandhi's incandescent influence on the world stage; his philosophy of nonviolent resistance inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. On home soil the Gandhi effect is hazier. Gandhi is everywhere and nowhere. His bespectacled face looks out from the ru- pee note. There are Mahatma Gandhi streets in many cities, statues too. Politicians invoke his name like an endorsement. But the absence of Gandhi is just as evident. Gandhi envisioned an India of self-sufficient villages. Caste and religion would grow faint as identity markers.
Gandhi's spinning wheel symbolized his belief in rural industry and self-reliance.
Governance would stress equality and nonvio- lence, Try finding that today. The huge, chaotic cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata), the materialist fever of swelling middle and upper classes, the election of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi to lead the country, an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and endemic violence against women suggest a very different national identity.
“India is schizophrenic about Gandhi, seeing him as the source of all good or all evil,” said Tri- dip Suhrud, director of the trust overseeing the ashram where Gandhi began his march. “You can quarrel with him, you can embrace him, but if you want to make sense of India, you have to deal with the guy.”
Even during his lifetime Gandhi proved a diffi- cult mentor. He made uncompromising demands on family, friends, and political allies, holding them to exalted moral standards. Strict beliefs about diet (he subsisted at various times on nuts, raw vegetables, and dried fruit) and sex (he took a vow of celibacy and heeded it for his last 42 years) alienated the public then as now. Yet the roles he played—politician, social reformer,
MARGARET BOURKE- WHITE, 1946, TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES
guru, journalist, peacemaker, educator, inven- tor—were so varied, like characters in an epic novel, that he offers something for everyone.
ON DAY ONE OF THE MARCH Gandhi made a sentimental stop two miles from his ashram. Already covered in dust stirred by the crowd, he paused before a school he had founded ten years earlier as an alternative to British education. Today a sandstone arch opens onto the leafy campus of Gujarat Vidyapith, its paths filled with students. They are dressed in loose shirts and pants made of khadi, the homemade cloth that became a symbol of Gandhi's revolution, standing for the rejection of British goods and the revival of traditional industry. It’s safe to say that students on other campuses in India are not wearing khadi, which roughly means “handwoven,” snubbing it as unstylish. Sudarshan Iyengar, a university trustee and noted economist, makes no excuses for the school’s unfashionable rules and expectations. “Here we train students in heart, hand, and head, in that order,” he said, sitting on the floor
IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS 95
OUR GREATNESS LIES NOT SO MUCH IN BEING ABLE TO REMAKE THE WORLD, AS IN BEING ABLE TO
REMAKE OURSELVES.
—Gandhi
On October 2 children dress like Bapu, a nickname for Gandhi meaning “father,” to mark his birthday in Rajkot, Gujarat, where he spent most of his boyhood. Many Gandhi followers fret that as India grows more urban and materialistic, the young will ignore his injunction to serve the less fortunate.
97
I DO NOT WANT TO FORESEE THE FUTURE. I AM
98 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
Inspired by Gandhi's teachings on equality, women dressed in hand- spun cloth, or khadi, march through Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu state in a celebration of his beliefs.
CONCERNED WITH TAKING CARE OF THE PRESENT. —canani
A midwife tends a pregnant woman in a remote part of Maharashtra state. Mobile clinics, started in 2013 by Gandhi’s Sevagram ashram, honor his commitment to rural health needs.
Delhi,
New Delhi™ \c, on ee Barharwae rene janse' . — pre on Chhatapyr \ Pedhamali INDIA 4 AREA Kolkata Rajkote ENLARGED (Calcutta)e Gadchiroli, Mumbai® (Bombay) Sabaimati~® ‘Ahmadabad March 12, 1930 le oad Vasana ‘ Rasnol Sihole; Reed * Kodaikanal gcaiere MARCHING FOR SALT SALT In 1930 Gandhi led ype, his followers ona 241-mile trek to the Surat sea to protest a \ Kapletha British law banning the independent Ks Dandi—# collection and sale pril'S, 1930. Dharasana
wearing white khadi. “Like Gandhi, we build character through communal life and work.”
Iyengar’s Gandhian beliefs run so deep that he can’t use his laptop computer without an- guishing over the implications. “I can see that Gandhi would have seen the computer as a tool to empower the individual,” he told me. “But what about the industrial process and the hid- den costs that it took to produce?”
What would Gandhi do? It’s the core question on this campus. Students I met spoke sincerely of Gandhi as a role model. But they didn’t in- tend to follow him in lockstep. A young woman told me she was there only because her father loved Gandhi. “For me he’s so-so,” she said, as a teacher nearby lifted her eyebrows in disap- proval. Who will wear khadi when you return home? I asked. Only a few raised their hands.
100 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
of salt in its colony.
Suddenly a female student with a pink watch- band approached me and exclaimed, “When I wear khadi, I feel like an extraordinary person.”
Our talk broke up at the sound of bells. It was spinning time. To prepare Indians for in- dependence by inculcating discipline and self- reliance, Gandhi urged women and men, in- cluding the highest officials, to produce at least 25 meters of yarn a year, enough to meet one’s needs. “Every revolution of the wheel spins peace, goodwill, and love,” he preached. Obeying the tradition, some 500 students filed into the auditorium carrying boxes with portable spin- ning wheels. Sitting cross-legged, they took out tufts of cotton and began spinning, their arms moving in and out, in and out. The only sound was the whisper of hundreds of spinning wheels speaking Gandhi’s message.
JEROME N. COOKSON, NGM STAFF
GANDHI WAS A FAST WALKER, his pace remark- able for a 61-year-old man who was the oldest on the march and whose joints ached from rheumatism. Each day, averaging 10 to 12 miles in inescapable heat, the party stopped in settle- ments to pray, rest, eat, and allow their leader to speak before rapt audiences. Gandhi was the first national figure to connect with rural Indi- ans. For him the village was the soul of India.
If Gandhi traveled to the same places today, he would see, probably to his dismay, that ru- ral India remains in many ways stuck in time. In Vasana, a cotton-farming village where the marchers halted under a mango tree that still stands, I found a statue of Gandhi with his walking stick. A drift of garbage had collected at its base. Cows and buffalo trod hypnotical- ly on the dirt lane, followed by barefoot boys. Women in saris hurried past with firewood on their heads. As a crowd gathered around me, a man in jeans stepped forward to apol- ogize for the unkempt memorial. I asked him if anyone wore khadi. Not anymore, he said. After a few more questions the man lost his cool. “People come here and talk about Gan- dhi, Gandhi, Gandhi, but nothing is done for us. There is no development,” he complained. “We need a bridge over the river anda roof over the statue’s head.”
Gandhi's vision of villages as the most fer- tile ground for India’s progress now seems like a utopian fever dream. Cities are where the jobs and schools and social life are. Urban problems—pollution, crime, overcrowding, traffic—dominate the national conversation. But almost 70 percent of India’s more than 1.2 billion people still live in the countryside. For Gandhi, a Hindu deeply influenced by the life of Jesus Christ, the highest calling was to go among the poor and “feed them first and then feed ourselves.” He appealed for volunteers to live in villages and bring change.
Some still hear the call. Five years before I met him, Thalkar Pelkar, a quiet young man always dressed in khadi, moved to Pedhamali, a scat- tering of mud-walled homes strung along a dry riverbed in western India. A graduate of Gujarat
Vidyapith, he had committed to two years of un- paid rural development work. He wasn’t totally gung ho. “I knew there was a chance I would get beaten up and pushed out,” he said.
Pelkar moved into a room without water or electricity. To fit in, he cut his hair and learned the local dialect. For months he battled loneli- ness and questioned his worthiness. In his room he hung a grainy photo of Gandhi. What would Gandhi do? The question weighed on him like a bag of stones.
Today the portrait hangs prominently in Pelkar’s new home, a once abandoned house he fixed up. Sitting on the floor with his wife, Snehan, and his son, Ajay, Pelkar, after some prodding, listed his accomplishments. He had revived the dairy, sparing women a 12-mile walk to buy milk. He had put women in charge of its accounting and testing. He had encouraged par- ents to send their children to school; enroll- ment had tripled to more than 150, bringing more classrooms and teachers. Three winters ago, seeing six-year-old Ajay abandoned on the street, he had adopted him.
Is your work done here? I asked. Pelkar sighed. “At first,” he said, “I thought two years would be enough to finish my project. Now I think it will take a whole lifetime.”
THE CROWDS THAT GREETED Gandhi along the Salt March were unlike any that modern India had seen—in schoolyards and fields, women by the hundreds showed up to hear Gandhi speak. They flooded the streets to accompany the marchers through towns. Fearing violence, Gandhi had chosen only men for the march, but he regarded women as natural allies. “I feel they will be worthier interpreters of nonvio- lence than men,” he said, “not because they are weak, as men in their arrogance believe them to be, but because they have greater courage.”
As was the case with many of his moral cru- sades, Gandhi’s campaign for gender equality was too soon. At its roots India remains a con- servative, patriarchal society. Gandhi spoke out against child marriage, violence against wom- en, the dowry system, and lack of schooling for
IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS 101
STRENGTH DOES
NOT COME FROM
PHYSICAL CAPACITY.
IT COMES FROM AN
INDOMITABLE WILL.
—Gandhi
Solidarity in the workplace spills over to the village well in Rasnol, Gujarat. It is one of thousands of places where the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a Gandhian trade union, has taken root. Its founder, Ela Bhatt, calls women “the pillars of village society.”
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INDIA LIVES IN HER
Where Gandhi once walked on his famous Salt March to protest British rule, tribal women in Kapletha are still weighed down by poverty. Ata brick kiln they earn less than three dollars a day.
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SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND VILLAGES. —canani
Acheap ticket buys a man a place to rest on a Gujarat train that tracks the route
of the Salt March. On his cross-country tours Gandhi always insisted on traveling third class with India’s poor.
women, but all remain embedded in daily life, despite flickers of progress. Yet fighting back, Gandhi style, has also endured.
“My strength is my women,” said Ela Bhatt, rocking on a bench swing in her simple home in Ahmadabad. She is the founder of the Self- Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a trade union and cooperative that counts more than 1.8 million members. Bhatt, born three years after the Salt March, looked like a sweet grandmother. The story she told, however, was full of steely determination. Bhatt quit her job as a lawyer fora textile union and in 1972 set up SEWA, reflecting the Gandhian belief in the dig- nity of work. For a few cents, the women gained access to training classes, bank loans, health in- surance, and child care. “Women in India have always been treated as second-class citizens,” she told me. “But they are the family leaders. Assets are safer in their hands.”
Echoing Gandhi comes naturally to Bhatt. Her grandfather, a doctor, was beaten and jailed during the salt protests. Her parents joined the independence movement. “I owe so much to the atmosphere of those times,” she said. “It was filled with idealism.” Bhatt’s organization started a revolution of its own, seeding women-based labor groups across southern Asia. “I am not a Gandhi scholar, nor a devotee,” Bhatt said point- edly. “Iam a Gandhi practitioner.”
Where SEWA is active, villages are different. Women seem bolder, more self-confident. In Si- hol, near the Salt March town of Anand, inside a patched-up building lit by small windows, shut- tles clack-clacked as women at wooden looms wove saris and towels. Before, said Gauriben Van- kar, the only work she could find was in tobacco fields for pennies a day. Now she was making many times that for each sari. “We can work out of the sun now, near our homes,” she said, “and we have more money for food.”
GANDHI WAS A PROVOCATEUR, frequently chal- lenging his audience. In Gajera, ten days after the march began, he sat on a platform before an expectant crowd, and he said nothing. The audi- ence grew uneasy. When Gandhi finally spoke,
106 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC « JULY 2015
he said that he would not deliver his talk unless the village leaders invited Untouchables to sit in their midst. This was an unorthodox demand.
Hindus shunned as polluted these members of the lowest caste. They did the filthiest jobs. They lived separately. They were forbidden to enter temples or draw water from village wells. Even their shadows were not allowed to touch other Hindus.
Gandhi had posed perhaps the most vex- ing test to those who professed to follow him. Shamed, officials motioned for the Untouch- ables on a nearby hill to join the gathering.
NONVIOLENCE IS NOT
A WEAPON OF THE WEAK.
IT IS A WEAPON OF THE
STRONGEST AND
THE BRAVEST.
—Gandhi
In Gajera no one wanted to tell me where I could find the Dalits (the preferred name now, literally meaning “broken”). Finally I asked the poorest looking person in sight, a sun-beaten woman carrying a jug of water on her head. She pointed to a cluster of blue-painted homes off by themselves. It was her neighborhood. Residents came out to greet me, excited to talk to an outsid- er. Life has improved some since Gandhi's visit. “Tn earlier times we had to bring our own cups to tea shops,” said a woman. “And when we brought grain to the house of a higher caste, they sprin- kled water on the ground afterward to purify it.”
Their economic status, though, has hardly changed: The bottom-caste townspeople re- main poor, like most Dalits, who comprise one in six Indians. Most older adults in Gajera work in the castor bean fields. Some younger ones have low-paying jobs in a glass factory.
Only in cities did I meet Dalits who could imagine joining India’s mainstream. Ata street- sweeper colony in Delhi, where Gandhi would often stay, a few young Dalit men approached me to brag that they were students, the first in their families to attend university, thanks to government scholarships.
Gandhi would have been overjoyed to meet them. By example—he adopted an Untouch- able child—and by ceaseless campaigning, he fought to remove the stigma of associating with Untouchables, whom he called Harijans, or Children of God. Yet he achieved no signifi- cant breakthroughs. Despite government pro- tections, Dalits still suffer widespread, often violent, discrimination. They belong to an India that Gandhi would sadly recognize.
AT LAST THEY COULD HEAR the sea. After walk- ing for more than three weeks, the marchers were closing in on the coastal village of Dandi as much of India and the Western world watched. Security forces, the press, and crowds of onlook- ers and supporters massed, waiting to see what would happen. Their leader had spent decades preparing for this moment.
Gandhi came of age as an activist and or- ganizer not in India, but in South Africa. He had arrived there in 1893 at the age of 24 asa provincial lawyer, and it was there that he first experienced virulent racism and injustice. In prisons in South Africa, where he was held for leading demonstrations against color-based laws, Gandhi studied the Bible and the Koran and the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and John Ruskin. He established ex- perimental communities in Durban and Johan- nesburg, then part of a British colony. By the time he returned to India to live in 1915, Gandhi had conceived his daring vision of satyagraha, a way of pursuing truth through nonviolent resis- tance, patience, and compassion.
For many historians, biographers, and activ- ists, the Salt March was Gandhi's purest achieve- ment. Through marches, fasts, civil disobedience, and mobilization of women, youth, and the dis- possessed, Gandhi created a new playbook for
social movements. In India, Gandhi-inspired organizers have led numerous nonviolent cam- paigns, especially on environmental issues such as forest destruction and dambuilding. “If you're a Gandhian, you don’t just preach, you do,” says P. V. Rajagopal, an activist who put himself and his followers to the test.
The issue was landlessness. Since Gandhi's time, the poor in India have steadily lost land to governmental development, corrupt landlords, and natural disasters, with little or no compen- sation. For Rajagopal and his organization, Ekta Parishad (Unity Association), a modern-day Salt March was needed. To enlist recruits, Ra- jagopal and a cadre of supporters spent almost a year visiting 26 of India’s 29 states, traveling to villages like Chhatapur, in Bihar, one of the poorest states.
In a schoolyard on a scorching day, he ad- dressed a few hundred people, mostly Dalit women. “It’s good to be angry,” Rajagopal said through a squawking microphone. “We’re not asking for computers, or TVs, or vehicles, or other comforts. We’re asking for land for houses, and so we can grow food. We’ve waited long enough. Who will join me ona march to Delhi?” Hands shot up. Rajagopal, a short man with gray- ing hair who moves swiftly between charmer and firebrand, bowed his head in thanks.
As his SUV bumped down a narrow dirt road between villages, Rajagopal explained that he was tapping the best part of Gandhi. “People end up picking what side of Gandhi they want,” he said. “I pick the radical side, not the Gan- dhi of prayer and meditation, but the fighting Gandhi. Bring back the Gandhi who fought against injustice and oppression.” Rajagopal also wants to bring back the padyatra, or foot march. “Walking is a message,” he said. “You're challenging yourself, your comfort, your body. And it’s a spiritual act. Your moral power gets stronger and stronger as you go.”
Six months later the message stretched for miles on a road leading to Delhi. Tens of thou- sands walked three abreast. The disciplined marchers started at first light. By midafternoon, after covering about ten miles, they stopped
IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS 107
RELIGIONS ARE NOT FOR SEPARATING MEN FROM
ONE ANOTHER; THEY ARE
MEANT TO BIND THEM.
—Gandhi
Hindu priests breathe prayers into rising smoke on a festival day in Barharwa Lakhansen, Bihar state. Raised in the Hindu faith, Gandhi incorporated pas- sages from the Koran and the Bible into his prayers. His vision of a secular and democratic India is instilled in today’s constitution.
108
LIVE AS IF YOU WERE TO DIE TOMORROW.
under the shade of bushes and trees to eat their one meal of the day: lentils and rice. “We have nothing left to lose,” a woman from Bihar said fiercely. “These days on the road are nothing compared to our struggles at home.”
MOHANDAS GANDHI broke the law in the early morning of April 6, 1930. In Dandi, near the sea, the man called Bapu, or “father,” by friends and strangers, bent over and pulled up a handful of muck, By the day’s end hundreds of supporters had done the same. Across India over the next months others joined in, illegally manufactur- ing salt from the sea faster than police could confiscate it. The Salt March did not topple Brit- ish rule—independence would come 17 years later—but it cracked the foundations.
It’s difficult to re-create the scene. The con- tours of the coast have changed, and the spot where Gandhi picked up salt is now dry ground. Finding Gandhi in a rapidly changing India is also not easy—nor should it be. When have vi- sionaries, with their demands and ideals, ever dwelled comfortably in the mainstream?
But as I looked for Gandhi, seeking him amid the clamor and complexity of urban and rural life, I found him. His spirit of defiance, high-minded and tough-natured, animates cam- paigns against corruption, rape, caste violence, and slum clearances. The growing confidence and achievements of women conjure up Gan- dhi’s demand to admit them into India’s public life. At his former ashrams, I felt the power of his example of simple living. Gandhi was by some lights a tragic failure, unable, for instance, to prevent Hindu-Muslim conflict or the break- away of majority-Muslim Pakistan. But on the beach in Dandi, the sight of Muslim and Hindu families wading into the surf, hems of saris lifted,
© ONE MORE THING
Rena Effendi was born in Azerbaijan, but grew up in the U.S.S.R.—a place she learned to make sense of through photography. She has won several awards for her work. This is her sec- ond feature story for the Geographic.
110 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JULY 2015
head scarves pushed back, testifies to the en- durance of the secular, tolerant democracy that Gandhi saw as India’s inheritance.
The light in the darkness, as Nehru described Gandhi's legacy, drew me to a settlement un- marked on maps in arural area of Maharashtra state. On a 40-acre spread near Gadchiroli, a community has sprung up of doctors, nurses, computer engineers, medical students, interns, family members, and support staff, recruited by Abhay and Rani Bang, co-founders of the Soci- ety for Education, Action and Research in Com- munity Health (SEARCH). Since the mid-1980s, Abhay, a physician; Rani, a gynecologist; and their colleagues have trained health workers, most of them illiterate women, in 124 villages. The results have been almost miraculous. In villages that have adopted their model of care for newborns, infant mortality rates have fallen dramatically. This approach to neonatal care, relying on local men and women trained in sim- ple techniques (such as using an abacus to count breaths), has been adapted across India and in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Bang never met Gandhi, but he feels close to him, having grown up on his Sevagram ashram in Maharashtra. Sitting behind a desk heaped with reports, Bang told me he often debates in his head with Gandhi about such challenges as environmental threats, religious violence, and healthy diets. “The Old Man predicted so much,” Bang said. “His principles are every- where you look.”
To live on the SEARCH ashram means accept- ing rules: no smoking or drinking, participating in weekly cleanups, attending evening prayer and talk sessions. The unspoken rule: Improve the lives of others. Here no one has to ask, What would Gandhi do? 0
For this story former staff writer Tom O'Neill liked to sit beneath trees where Gandhi had spoken. “I'd tell villagers | was meeting Gandhi,” he says. “They’d smile and hurry away, convinced a madman had come to town.”
MARIA IONOVA-GRIBINA (LEFT); REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF